What Makes Life Worth Living
For Caroline
What Makes Life
Worth Living
On Pharmacology
Bernard Stiegler
Translated by Daniel Ross
polity
First published in French as Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue
© Flammarion 2010
This English edition © Polity Press, 2013
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
vii
1
Part I
7
Pharmacology of Spirit
1
Apocalypse Without God
9
2
Pathogenesis, Normativity and the ‘Infidelity of
the Milieu’
27
Pharmacology of Nuclear Fire, Generalized
Automation and Total Proletarianization
37
3
Part II
4
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
Part III
5
Pharmacology of Nihilism
Pharmacology of Capital
Economizing Means Taking Care: The Three Limits
of Capitalism
57
59
79
81
vi
Contents
Part IV
Pharmacology of the Question
99
6
The Time of the Question
101
7
Disposable Children
119
Notes and References
Index
134
152
Acknowledgements
The Publishers are grateful to the original publishers for permission to reproduce material (which runs in this edition from Section
2 of Chapter 1 to Section 23 of Chapter 2) included on pages
294–310 of the collection Theory after ‘Theory’, edited by Jane
Elliott and Derek Attridge and published by Taylor and Francis
in 2011.
Sources for epigraphs are as follows: p. viii: Donald W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 87; p. viii:
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading (London: Penguin, 2009); p. 7:
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago,
IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 3–4;
p. 101: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 226.
Do not be careless [me amelesete].
Socrates, in Plato, Phaedo 118a
Living itself [is a] therapy that makes sense.
Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality
The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist only succeeds
in partially raising for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance
that leaves us uncaring [incurieux] before the world. Then, he says
to us:
‘Look, look
‘Fragrant with clover and artemesia
‘Holding tight their quick, narrow streams
‘The lands of the Aisne and the Oise.’
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
Consumers consume consumptions.
Raymond Queneau
Introduction
The loss of the feeling of existing
A mother, according to Donald Winnicott,1 by taking care of her
infant, even before the child is old enough to speak, teaches it that
life is worth living. She instils in the child the feeling that life is
worth living.
Maternal care, which obviously provides this feeling back to
the mother herself, passes through the intermediary of what
Winnicott called the ‘transitional object’. This object enables and
conditions the relation between mother and child and, as such, it
is not a mere intermediary: it constitutes the mother as this mother,
in her very way of being a mother, and this child as her child.
The transitional object has a distinct virtue: it does not exist.
Certainly, something exists that enables it to appear – for example,
a teddy bear or cuddly toy. But what makes this teddy bear or
cuddly toy able to open up ‘transitional space’ – which Winnicott
also called ‘potential space’ – in which the mother can encounter
her child; what makes this teddy bear or cuddly toy able to become
the transitional object, is that, beyond that part of the object that
exists in external space, beyond or beneath this piece of cloth,
there holds something that is precisely neither in exterior space,
nor simply internal to either the mother or the child.
In this beyond or beneath of both the exterior and the interior,
there is something that holds between the mother and her child,
and which nevertheless does not exist. What takes hold between
2
Introduction
the mother and child in not existing, but in passing through the
transitional object, and which therefore finds itself constituted by
it, links and attaches them to one another through a wonderful
relationship: a relation of love, of amour fou.
What holds and is upheld as this link through which these two
beings become incommensurable and infinite for one another, is
what, by allowing a place for that which is infinite, consists precisely to the immeasurable extent [dans la mesure et la démesure]
that it does not exist – because the only things that exist are finite
things.
This consistence, more than anything else, and before anything
else, is what a mother protects when she protects her child. This
protection, which is care par excellence, is grounded in the knowledge the mother has of the extra-ordinary character of the object
– and that Winnicott calls transitional precisely in order to designate this extra-ordinariness.
Such was Winnicott’s great discovery: the fact that maternal
knowledge is knowledge of that which, in the transitional object,
consists, though it does not exist, and which gives to the child
placed under this protection the feeling that ‘life is worth living’.2
I argue in this work that the transitional object is the first
pharmakon.
The question of the pharmakon first arose in contemporary
philosophy with Jacques Derrida’s commentary on the Phaedrus
in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.3
Writing – as hypomnesis, hypomnematon, that is, artificial
memory – is that pharmakon whose artificial and poisonous effects
Plato combats by opposing them to anamnesis, to thinking ‘for
oneself’, that is, to the autonomy of thought. Derrida has shown,
however, that this autonomy nevertheless always has something
to do with heteronomy – in this case, that of writing – and that,
while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact constantly compose.
The transitional object is the first pharmakon because it is both
an external object on which the mother and child are dependent
(losing it is enough to make this clear) and in relation to which
they are thus heteronomous; and an object that, not existing but
consisting, provides (through this very consistence) sovereignty to
Introduction
3
both mother and child: their serenity, their trust in life, their
feeling that life is worth living, their autonomy.
The pharmakon that is the transitional object is the point of
departure for the formation of a healthy psychic apparatus. And
it is also, in particular through sublimation, a condition of keeping
the psychic apparatus of the adult in good health.
But Winnicott shows that a bad relation to this object and to
its heteronomy is just as possible as the care that it alone makes
possible. Dependence then becomes harmful, that is, destructive
of autonomy and trust. The care that the mother must take of her
child, then, necessarily includes the way she protects her child
from this object: from what it contains that is threatening.4 And
eventually she must teach her children to detach themselves from
it.
It is in this way that the mother must bring the child to adopt
– or not – its transitional situation, that is, its pharmacological
situation, on the basis of which the child will be able to attain, or
not, the feeling that life is worth living. By bringing the child to
adopt the pharmakon, what Winnicott calls the good mother also
teaches the child to detach itself from the transitional object so as
to engage with other transitional spaces, with which it will establish other relations, all of which may distance the child from the
mother herself – despite which she does not lose her infinite
dimension.
This is why the transitional object does not only concern the
child and mother: it is also, as first pharmakon, the origin of works
of art and, more generally, of the life of the mind or spirit in all
its forms, and thus of adult life as such. It is, finally, the origin of
all objects, because an object is always that which, once upon a
time, appeared to a mind that projected it.
We shall see that, ultimately, things can constitute a world only
insofar as they irreducibly proceed from the transitional character
of the object. Having become ordinary and everyday, and in this
sense ‘mundane’ (or ‘intramundane’), the transitional object conserves its pharmacological dimension, even if this ‘mundanity’
tends to conceal this dimension. As such, it can always engage not
only curative projection processes but poisonous ones, becoming,
for example, the support of an addiction, the screen of melancholy, and even a drive of destruction, of murderous madness, of
4
Introduction
those dangerous states that result when the feeling that life is
worth living has been lost.
To lose the feeling that life is worth living may drive one to
furious madness.
Re-reading Playing and Reality over the last year in order to
prepare a course which to some extent lies at the origin of the
present work,5 I was astounded to discover that, according to
Winnicott, the patients under his care had ‘lost the feeling of existing’. I was astounded because I immediately recalled that these
were the exact words, ‘lost the feeling of existing’, that Richard
Durn wrote in his diary when he admitted or forewarned, but a
forewarning to no one in particular, that this loss was so abyssal
and painful that it could well lead him to commit a massacre.6
The pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that
of which care must be taken – in the sense that it is necessary to
pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent
[dans la mesure et la démesure] that it is also destructive.
This ‘at once’ characterizes what I call a pharmacology, on
which and from which I shall try to open perspectives in the pages
which follow.
As far as I know, Derrida never envisaged the possibility of such
a pharmacology – that is, of a discourse on the pharmakon understood in the same gesture in its curative and toxic dimensions.
And this can only be a source of regret for us, those who, in the
twenty-first century, are trying to remain non-inhuman beings,
and for whom the question of the pharmakon is not merely an
academic issue for learned philosophers: it obsesses each and every
one of us.
This state of affairs [état de fait] requires a rule of law [état de
droit], a thought that, even if it can no longer secure a clear separation between fact and right – a difference between heteronomy
and autonomy that would be not only clear but absolute –
nevertheless learns to distinguish them in a new way, that is,
without opposing them. The pharmacological question that now
concerns each and every one of us thus becomes a primary question for the academic world and for the world as a whole.
This pharmacological question haunts planetary consciousness
and the planetary unconscious, just as it haunts the immense loss
Introduction
5
of trust that inevitably results from the loss of care. This question
thus characterizes the economic and spiritual crisis afflicting the
‘earth-ark’.7 This crisis is therefore unprecedented, which means
that it is more critical than ever.
Krisis means ‘decision’. We all now know that it is the future
of terrestrial life that is at stake with unprecedented urgency. We
all know, whether we admit it or whether we prefer to know
nothing about it, nor even to hear about it, that with the historical
sequence that began to unfold in 2007, every step counts, and
seems to be systemically overloaded with consequences that would
be extremely difficult to reverse – if not absolutely irreversible.
It is in this context that there arises, today, the question of care,
and of its condition: the pharmakon.
Part I
Pharmacology of Spirit
Is it not remarkable that this theme, spirit [. . .] should have been
disinherited [forclos d’héritage]? No one wants anything to do with
it any more, in the entire family of Heideggerians, be they the
orthodox or the heretical, the neo-Heideggerians or the paraHeideggerians, the disciples or the experts. No one ever speaks of
spirit in Heidegger. Not only this: even the anti-Heideggerian specialists take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to
denounce it. Why?
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
1
Apocalypse Without God
1.
Apocalyptic feeling and economic war
In 1919, Paul Valéry began ‘La crise de l’esprit’ with the following
words: ‘We later civilizations . . . we too now know that we are
mortal’.1 We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century who have
not been through a world war, and who form present-day humankind, now know that we are capable of self-destruction. And if in
the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was
inconceivable other than as the consequence of God’s anger – of
original sin – today there is no longer any religious reference at
the origin of this extreme global pessimism.
The cause of this mood, which became even more downbeat in
2009 after the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, is an economic
war without mercy: a concealed conflict, a bottomless hypocrisy,
a constant struggle, exhausting the Earth and its inhabitants, and
leaving a billion of them in abominable economic misery while
ruining the whole of the human world ever more quickly and ever
more irreversibly, such that, in this war disguised as peace, it will
not be long before everyone loses.
The name of this war is globalization – a globalization in which
industrial technologies have become weapons that destroy ecosystems, social structures and psychic apparatuses. If the time has
come for an armistice and, with it, for the negotiation of a new
peace treaty, which would be a new contract, and not only a social
10
Pharmacology of Spirit
contract, but a scientific, technological and global contract; if too
many ruins are being accumulated in the name of ‘development’
and economic competition, then this raises a preliminary question:
what relation to technics and to technologies would enable us to
think the reconstruction of a global future?
The economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 has exposed the profoundly destructive nature of the globalized industrial system.
Everybody now knows that it is no longer feasible to continue
pursuing the ‘misgrowth’ [mécroissance] that is a global economic
war disguised as a consumerist peace by the psycho-power of
marketing.2 Yet nobody can see how to re-find the path capable
of leading to peaceful growth and development. It is this combination of knowledge and non-knowledge that leads to the spread of
this ordinary, everyday apocalyptic feeling – the feeling and the
knowledge that something has come to an end.
2.
‘So many horrors could not have been
possible without so many virtues’
In what he analysed in 1919 as a crisis of mind or spirit, Valéry
highlighted above all the fundamental ambiguity of this spirit – of
the science, reason, knowledge and even the moral elevation that
made possible so much ruination, death and devastation throughout Western Europe, beyond what any previous historical epoch
could ever have imagined:
So many horrors could not have been possible without so many
virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to
waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a
time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed.
Knowledge and Duty, then, are suspect.3
Valéry, just like Husserl a little later, and like so many
thinkers who were overwhelmed between the wars, thus described
the way in which the First World War revealed that spirit is
always composed of two contrary sides: it is a kind of pharmakon
– at once a good and an evil, at once a remedy and a poison,
as Plato said about writing, which is the technology of the rational
mind.
Apocalypse Without God
11
The evidence for this pharmacology, for this ambiguity and
hence for this fragility of spirit, impressed itself on Valéry and his
contemporaries in the form of a series of interconnected crises –
military, economic and spiritual4 – through which science is ‘dishonoured’.5 After the First World War,
everything essential in the world has been affected by the war [. . .].
The Mind [or Spirit] itself has not been exempt from all this
damage. The mind is in fact cruelly stricken; it grieves in men
of intellect, and looks sadly upon itself. It distrusts itself
profoundly.6
3.
‘Sciences of fact’ and ‘humanity of facts’:
the extinction of the Enlightenment
Sixteen years after Valéry, Husserl in turn spoke of a crisis of
science. This crisis proceeds from a ‘change which set in at the
turn of the past century’, which concerns ‘the general evaluation
of the sciences’, and which aims at ‘what science in general has
meant and could mean for human existence’:
The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man,
in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined
by the positive sciences and blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which
are decisive for a genuine humanity. Mere sciences of fact create a
mere humanity of facts.7
At the time Husserl was writing these lines, Hitler had already
been Chancellor for two years, and a plebiscite bestowing upon
him the title of Führer had received support from 92 per cent of
the German electorate.
The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after
the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of
hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need – so we
are told – this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy
times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning:
12
Pharmacology of Spirit
questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this
human existence.8
Reading these lines in 2010, how can we doubt that this malaise
in relation to science has returned with even greater force? It is
thus the spirit of the Enlightenment that seems to have been extinguished, writes Husserl. The Enlightenment – that is:
the ardent desire for learning, the zeal for a philosophical reform
of education and of all of humanity’s social and political forms of
existence, which makes that much-abused Age of Enlightenment so
admirable.9
Having become ‘positive sciences’ and ‘mere sciences of fact’,
and forming a ‘mere humanity of facts’, the Enlightenment has
been inverted into Darkness. It has its hymn: ‘We possess an
undying testimony to this spirit in the glorious “Hymn to Joy” of
Schiller and Beethoven.’ But this hymn (which has become that of
the European Union) can ‘only with painful feelings [be heard]
today. A greater contrast with our present situation is
unthinkable.’10
4.
Economy of spirit and organology
On the eve of the Second World War, four years after Husserl
published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, from which the above words are taken, Valéry
returns in ‘Freedom of the Mind’ to the state of the krisis of mind
or spirit, and deplores having to do so:
It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that today it is
not only necessary, but imperative to interest people’s minds in the
fate of the Mind [or Spirit] – that is, in their own fate.11
Returning to the question of Spirit in 1939 was an attempt to
interest minds in their own fate and in the fate of Spirit, above all
by highlighting that this proceeds from a spiritual economy12 that
cannot be considered in isolation from the material economy:13
these two economies, which must be distinguished as that of the
Apocalypse Without God
13
useful and the useless,14 but which can never be separated, are
products of the same organs.
Seventy years after Valéry returned to this question, seventy
years after the onset of the Second World War, which brought
horror at a level that would have been unimaginable to the Valéry
of 1919, we must draw the consequences of the fact that two
inseparable yet contradictory economies operate with the same
organs: these two economies call for an organology, which is also
a pharmacology, given that what an organ can accomplish in the
material economy (that is, negotium) may be contrary to what this
very same organ makes possible in the spiritual economy (that is,
otium):15
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs; more than that,
the same types of signs, the same tokens of exchange, the same
languages, the same modes of logic that function in the most indispensable actions of our life, all likewise figure in our most gratuitous, conventional, and extravagant actions.16
These two economies are always in a relation of conflict over
values, because our species always lives on two planes at once,
which are also two different scales of value: the plane of conservation, on which all living beings live, and a plane that exceeds this
conservation:
In short, man does not have two sets of equipment, he has only
one; and sometimes it functions to maintain his life, his physiological rhythm, and sometimes it furnishes the illusions and labours of
our great adventure.17
And our organs – physiological and artificial – are always
simultaneously at the service of these two economies, developing
in parallel: ‘The same ship or rowboat brought merchandise and
gods . . . ideas and methods’.18 And for a very long time there was
a ‘parallel between the intellectual development and the commercial, industrial, and banking development of the Mediterranean
and Rhine basins’.19 This, however, is no longer the case:
Culture, cultural changes, the value put on matters of the mind,
the appraisal of its products, and the place we give to these in the
14
Pharmacology of Spirit
hierarchy of man’s needs – we know now that, on the one hand,
all this is related to the ease and the variety of exchanges of all
sorts; on the other hand, it is strangely precarious.20
In 1939, Valéry claimed to share with many of his contemporaries the ‘sense of a decline of intellect, a threat to culture, a twilight
of the purer divinities, [a sensation that is] growing stronger and
stronger in all those who can sense anything in the order of those
higher values of which we are speaking [under the name of
spirit]’.21 Such a becoming, which leads to a ‘fall in spirit value’,22
proceeds from a suicidal tendency: ‘there is an element of suicide
in the feverish and superficial life of the civilised world’.23
5.
Perfecting organs and melancholy
Ten years earlier, and ten years after Valéry’s first address, Freud,
perceiving the mass regression that he had already reflected on in
1921 in Massenpsychologie, pointed out that ‘present-day man
does not feel happy’, and becomes even less happy the more he
comes to resemble a ‘prosthetic god’.24
In this ‘malaise’ of culture and civilization, technics (prostheticity) plays an essential role because it is eminently pharmacological,
particularly as the system of artificial organs it forms in the industrial age. After listing the benefits of industrial technical progress,
which seem to bring those near to me even nearer, to protect my
children from death, to prolong my own life,25 and so on, he raises
the contrary and systemic secondary effects of this progress:
If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would
never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to
hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been
introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage
and should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What
is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that
reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children [. . .]?26
Such a becoming is only possible because, in an essential and
original way, ‘man is perfecting his own organs’.27
Apocalypse Without God
15
In the course of this ‘perfecting’ (or improvement),28 technics
constantly compensates for a default of being (of which Valéry
also speaks)29 by constantly bringing about a new default – always
greater, always more complex and always less manageable than
the one that preceded it. This constant disadjustment induces
frustrations, narcissistic wounds, and melancholy.
6.
Pharmacology of the imagination
In Dialectic of Enlightenment,30 five years after ‘Freedom of the
Mind’, Adorno and Horkheimer emphasized how a diversion
[détournement] of reason, or a reversal [retournement] of reason,
reducing the project of the Aufklärung to rationalization,31 led to
the opposite of that reason which the Aufklärer conceived essentially as the emancipation of minds and the conquest of maturity
[majorité], that is, as the struggle against minority.
Thus rationality becomes rationalization, in the sense given
to this word by Max Weber, ‘rationalizing’ society by spreading
the reign of calculability, and producing the opposite of maturity
understood as the individual and collective formation and
education of intelligence and knowledge, that is, understood as
Bildung. And rationalization, which here appears as the application and technical diversion of scientific reason (which is precisely
what Habermas maintained), engenders an immense social and
psychic irrationality, that is, a massive alienation of mind and
spirit.
This is what results from the fact that these minds have become,
above all, consumers targeted by the culture industry, the control
of minds driving them back into their minority, thereby completing what was begun with the submission of the bodies of producers to the service of machines, that is, completing their
proletarianization. Such was the ‘fall of spirit value’ observed in
America in 1944 by these two Germans who had emigrated to
New York in order to re-establish the Institute of Social Research
created in Frankfurt in 1932.
What such an analysis ignores, however, is the pharmacological
character of technics in general, and of the psycho-technologies
implemented by the culture industries in particular. It is on this
precise point that there is a divergence between Adorno and
16
Pharmacology of Spirit
Benjamin (who committed suicide in 1940): whereas for Benjamin
industrial technics, as the essential phenomenon of reproducibility,
opens a new political question – imposing on philosophy a new
task, new criteria of judgement, a new critique (a new analytic for
the new perceptual possibilities arising with the organological turn
constituted by the technologies of the reproducibility of the sensible) – for the thinkers of critical theory, this fact was, on the
contrary, apprehended essentially and exclusively as a critical
regression.
Habermas has drawn the consequences of this position by
essentially defining rationalizing reason – that is, the power to
dominate through rationalization (and to legitimate this domination by science-become-technoscience) – as rational activity in
relation to an end, ‘purposive-rational activity’,32 while he defines
technological rationality essentially as the means to such an end,
thereby opposing it to speech, which, as communicative activity,
is not the means of thought so much as its element.33 This position
is completely different to Valéry’s.
It is thus the question of the essentially pharmaco-logical
(because techno-logical) character of logos itself that is ignored by
Adorno and Horkheimer – and subsequently by Habermas. And
this is because so-called critical theory proceeds with the Kantian
transcendental imagination, just as Plato proceeds with the question of anamnesis in its relation to hypomnesis.
This ‘critique’ of the culture industry consists in effect and
above all in denouncing, in the domination of Hollywood – and
its development through television, which was then still to come
– a teratology whereby that which constitutes the imagination as
such, namely, what was conceptualized by Kant as the schematism
of the transcendental imagination, finds itself mechanically expropriated by the cinematic system of production and projection: that
is, by an artificial imagination which extenuates and atrophies the
transcendental imagination, just as hypomnesis bypasses, shortcircuits and annihilates the anamnesis that, for Plato, defines
thought itself.
Now, just as the literal (that is, lettered) pharmakon is the condition of its own critique,34 the transcendental imagination and
its schema will always already have necessitated a cinema of
Apocalypse Without God
17
projections founded on repro-ducibility, which is the condition of
possibility (and impossibility) of what Kant called the synthesis
speciosa, that is, the capacity for figuration.35
As rational imagination, the transcendental imagination of
which the synthesis speciosa is the projection must retain the trace
of what it imagines by putting it into images – and geometry as
figuration is essentially this experience, foundational for all philosophy, into which it is impossible to enter without having experienced the pharmacology of the figure, that is, of the imagination.
Such is the challenge of The Origin of Geometry.36
This figure can in fact always present itself as a disfiguration
[défiguration], since the geometrical concept could never be
reduced to the configuration of a figure that would inevitably be
empirical, that is, artificial [factice]: it is geometrical only as
a figure that supports a reasoning that it projects, a reason
that sublimates and idealizes it, that projects a mathematical
ideality. Kant proposes that this ideality pre-cedes, as concept,
its projection into figure, a concept that might thus be said to
be a priori, whereas it is always possible to make a posteriori use
of such a figure without geometrical knowledge, and in the service
of a technical knowledge, that is, of a knowledge that is blind
to it.
It is in this way that the mason is able to make use of a geometrical rule that he has not himself thought – that he does not
himself understand. And this can, according to Husserl, generate
a technicization of scientific institutions and an automation of
calculation, such that the European sciences enter into crisis
because they have lost their ‘originary intuitions’.37
Kant, however, opposes the schema (that is, the concept) to
the image, and proposes that the image always presupposes
the schema, which would therefore be the transcendental
origin – the image being only an empirical translation of the
transcendental faculty that is the imagination as such. In so
doing, Kant makes it impossible to think the originarily pharmacological condition of the imagination, which, contrary to his
analyses, always presupposes its projection through a technical
exteriorization38 in an object-image, which is what I call ‘tertiary
retention’.39
18
Pharmacology of Spirit
7.
Anamnesis and transindividuation
Whether it is a matter of the critique of sophistic logography
according to Plato, or the critique of Hollywood’s artificial imagination according to Adorno and Horkheimer, what is at stake is
the relation to the pharmakon, that is, to technics. But Adorno
and Horkheimer fail to understand technics pharmacologically –
or else they see in the pharmakon only its poisonous character,
which means that they do not see it as pharmakon.
Furthermore, in the twentieth century this ‘pharmacology’ that
is technics became industrial, which is also to say, technoscientific:
as rationalization, the pharmakon is now constituted through
science itself, and it is as such a product of anamnesis – except
that we may wonder whether, today, science remains anamnesic
(this was precisely Husserl’s question in Crisis of the European
Sciences).40
Anamnesic memory, which for Plato was the source of all
knowledge, all ontologically grounded episteme, all mathesis and
all learning [apprentissage], constitutes the pure autonomy of
thinking for oneself. As such, it could be called transcendental
memory. Plato constituted this transcendental memory by opposing it to hypomnesic memory, that is, artificial memory, the pharmakon. Likewise, Kant devalued the object-image by subordinating
it to the scheme, which he thus postulated as a transcendental
absolute (an a priori concept) grounding an ontology.
Logos is always a dia-logos within which those who enter the
dialogue co-individuate themselves – trans-form themselves, learn
something – by dia-loguing. This co-individuation can result in
discord, in which case each participant is individuated with the
other, but against the other – as occurs, for example, in a game
of tennis or chess. But co-individuation can also result in accord
or agreement, in which case it enables the production of a concept
that is shared by the interlocutors, who thus together produce a
new locution through which they agree on a meaning [signification] – which, in Platonic doctrine, must be produced in the form
of a definition responding to the question, ‘ti esti?’41
In the terminology of Simondon, this meaning constitutes the
‘transindividual’. The transindividual is the outcome of what I
analyse as a process of transindividuation, in which circuits of
Apocalypse Without God
19
transindividuation are produced, circuits that form networks, that
are more or less long, through which intensities circulate (desires:
circuits of transindividuation are always circuits of desire),42 and
which can be short-circuited.
An anamnesic circuit is a long circuit co-produced by those
through whom it passes:43 this is what Plato called ‘thinking for
oneself’, and only in this way may a mathesis be formed into an
episteme.
A hypomnesic circuit may bypass or short-circuit this long
circuit through which a soul is trans-formed and through which
it learns. It may come to de-form the soul as a consequence of
interiorizing a circuit that it has not itself produced – by requiring
the soul to adapt itself to a doxa, that is, to dominant ideas that
have not been produced and conceived by those who merely
submit to them, rather than share in them.
8.
Pharmakon, pharmakos and the
pharmacology of the scapegoat
It was Jacques Derrida who opened up the question of pharmacology – within which the hypomnesic appears as that which constitutes the condition of the anamnesic. I have striven in various
works to establish how the noetic movements through which a
soul is trans-formed are always arrangements of primary and
secondary retentions and protentions, arrangements themselves
conditioned by tertiary retentions, that is, by hypomnesic systems.
It follows from these analyses that everything that opposes the
anamnesic to the hypomnesic, such as transcendental memory or
transcendental imagination, leads to an impasse.44
The fact remains that there is an historical and political necessity at the origin of such oppositions: Plato struggles against that
sophistic that had caused the spirit of the Greek polis to enter into
crisis through its misuse of the pharmakon – through bypassing
and short-circuiting thought, that is, anamnesis, thus depriving the
souls of citizens of that knowledge lying at the foundation of all
citizenship (all autonomy). In this regard, the pharmakon was a
factor in the proletarianization of spirit (in the loss of knowledge)
just as the machine-tool would later be a factor in the proletarianization of the bodies of producers, that is, of workers (depriving
20
Pharmacology of Spirit
them of their know-how, their savoir-faire).45 Likewise, it is a
system that proletarianizes minds that Adorno and Horkheimer
denounced in the Hollywood imagination machinery of the citizen-become-consumer (even though they did not analyse it in these
terms).
Nothing is more legitimate than these philosophical struggles
against what, in technics or technology, is toxic for the life of the
mind or spirit. But faced with that which, in the pharmakon,
constitutes the possibility of a weakening of the spirit, these struggles ignore the originarily pharmaco-logical constitution of this
spirit itself. They ignore the pharmacology of spirit by taking the
pharmakon in general as a pharmakos: a scapegoat – like those
found in the sacrificial practices of polytheistic ancient Greece, or
equally in Judea, practices in which this pharmakos is laden
[chargé], as Christ will be, with every fault, before being led ‘into
an inaccessible region’.46
9.
Pharmacology of the transitional object
and default of interiority
What would be regressive, here, would be to propose that tertiary
retention is a poison that destroys interiority, because in fact there
never was any interiority – if by that is meant an originally virgin
source of all affection. Interiority is constituted through the internalization of a transitional exteriority that precedes it, and this is
as true for anthropogenesis as it is for infantile psychogenesis: the
transitional object constitutes the infantile stage of the pharmacology of spirit, the matrix through which transitional space is formed
in transductive relation to the ‘good mother’, that is, to the provider of care.
This relation of care constituted by the transitional object, that
is, by the first pharmakon, forms the basis of what becomes, as
transitional space, an intermediate area of experience where
objects of culture, the arts, religion and science are formed:
Of every individual that has reached the stage of being a unit with
a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said
that there is an inner reality [. . .] but is it enough? [T]he third part
of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an
Apocalypse Without God
21
intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.47
Spirit is the après-coup internalization of this non-interiority (as
revenance), also referred to by Winnicott as ‘potential space’,48
and this internalization presupposes care, that is, a process of
apprenticeship through which an art of internalization is developed – an art of living – that Winnicott called creativity.
Within that pharmacological space that is ‘potential space’,
which alone makes this creativity possible, where pharmaka form
transitional objects of all kinds, autonomy is not what opposes
heteronomy, but that which adopts it as a necessary default [un
défaut qu’il faut], and is what ‘makes the individual feel that life
is worth living’.49 What Winnicott called the self (‘the interior’) is
constituted from the primordial default of interiority as the adoption (as creativity, that is, as individuation) of transitional space.
Internalization is a co-individuation of this space itself (transitional space thus being constituted as a process of transindividuation in which circuits form).
Pharmacologically, transitional space becomes poisonous (that
is, in the language of Winnicott, a form of ‘illness’)50 when it
installs
a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the
world and its details being recognised but only as something to be
fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it
a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea
that nothing matters.51
The thought of non-interiority is without doubt what, in a thousand ways, characterizes philosophical thought in the twentieth
century, in Europe as in America, but also, as we have just seen,
and in an essential area, in psychopathology. There is no doubt that
this constitutes the common ground of so-called ‘French theory’.
What, however, remains at worst ignored, but at best a site that has
hardly been opened – which thus constitutes, and this is my thesis,
the major site on which to build a new critique – is the pharmacological and therapeutic question constituted by the transitional
space of those transitional objects that are pharmaka.
22
Pharmacology of Spirit
This site remains hardly [à peine] opened because pharmacology presupposes organology, itself including and necessitating a
history of the process of grammatization52 (which grammatology,
as logic of the supplement, was insufficient for thinking).
10.
The pharmacological critique of the unconscious
If this is the precise point on which ‘critical theory’ remains unsatisfactory, in lacking what constitutes the condition of any critique
(of which anamnesis is for Plato the model), namely, the pharmakon, which also makes possible the short-circuit of any critique,
it nonetheless remains the case that in Dialectic of Enlightenment
Adorno and Horkheimer succeeded in identifying the unfolding
of a process in which the culture industries become the central
element. And it remains necessary in our time to reopen this question by honouring the lucidity of these thinkers, as well as certain
others – and in particular Marcuse53 – while nevertheless analysing
their limits (which is the only way of honouring a philosophy).
To analyse their limits is to lose oneself in, and to try and feel
one’s way around in, shadows: in what their illuminations owe to
shadows, if it is true that lucidity is that which brings light, and
if it is true that there is no light without shadows – if not blindness. This task arises today, as ever, and as the reopening of the
question of reason, at the very moment when rationalization, and
the resulting domination of the irrational, now constitutes a systemic stupidity [bêtise]54 – lying at the heart of what must above
all be described and delimited as a systemic crisis of global
finance.55
Systemic stupidity is engendered by generalized proletarianization, from which there is no escape for any actor within
the consumerist industrial system,56 proletarianization resulting
precisely from a pharmacological development, where the
pharmakon short-circuits those whom it inscribes in the circuit
of production, consumption and speculation, and does so
by destroying investment, that is, the desiring projection of
imagination.57
The real question is not, however, as Adorno and Horkheimer
believed, the exteriorization of imagination (there has never
Apocalypse Without God
23
been any imagination without object-images, that is, without
tertiary retentions of all kinds), but rather the dysfunction
of that libidinal economy that is presupposed by reason,
reason being a fruit of a libidinal economy that constitutes it
as projector of shadows as well as light – of powers and
potentials of the unconscious constituting the depth of field of
consciousness.
Revisiting the questions of critical theory, a new critique is
required by the originarily pharmacological situation of spirit: a
pharmacological critique of the unconscious – and here this clearly
involves a double genitive. If reason has always been opposed to
passion, to pathos, both of these themselves confounded with
affect and desire, nevertheless for Plato (in Symposium) desire is
the condition and the necessary default [le défaut qu’il faut] of
philosophy. And for Aristotle, whose On the Soul is the horizon
of Spinoza’s Ethics, desire (as movement towards the prime
unmoving mover, object of all desire) is the condition of all forms
of life: vegetative, sensitive or noetic.
What still lies before us, when it comes to reason understood
above all as motive, as the most elevated modality of desire (that
is, of movement, of e-motion), is to identify the role of pharmaka
in the formation of desire in general, and in the formation of
reason in particular – in the formation of consciousness as attention, in the sense both of psychic attention and social attention,
that is, moral consciousness – such that it then constitutes the
therapeutic of this pharmacology.58
This is the point of departure for a new critique, which is
necessarily as such a critique of the unconscious: the pharmakon,
in all its forms, is above all a support for the projection of
fantasies, that is, a sort of fetish. As such, it is always possible
for it to cause desire to regress to a purely drive-based stage.
From out of the critique of the unconscious, and as practice of
the pharmakon as a transitional object, a new critique of consciousness becomes possible, a new theory that can only be a
political economy of the spirit as the formation of attention, itself
conditioned by the play of primary and secondary retentions, a
play of retentions that the pharmakon, as tertiary retention,
authorizes.
24
Pharmacology of Spirit
11.
Pharmacology of the libido
The fire of Prometheus is at once:
• the fire of Hephaestus, symbol of technical knowledge, but also
of the fabrication of arms, which thus also brings the destructive fire of war; and
• the fire of desire that takes care of its object, but that is always
close to the burning drives, source of consumption in all its
forms.
The fire of Prometheus, symbol of both desire and technics, is
therefore the subject par excellence of the pharmacology of the
unconscious, that is, of the libido.
Vernant outlined the elements of a pharmacology of fire that is
simultaneously that of technics (Hephaestus and Prometheus), of
desire (Pandora), and of domestic space, that is, of the most intimate oikonomia (Hestia, goddess of the hearth, of private space,
of inside, forming a couple with Hermes, god of outdoors and of
public space).59 Hestia is the divinity of domesticity understood as
the care taken of this pharmakon that is fire, and in this pharmacology that is, therefore, all economy – the ideal figure of a ‘philosophy of care’.
Fire is the pharmakon par excellence. As civilizing process, it is
constantly at risk of setting fire to civilization. As the emblem
common to technics and desire, it constitutes and articulates a
dual logic of the necessary default:
• that logic shown by Freud to operate via the ‘perfecting of
organs’, that is, as technics, a process that interminably displaces organic and organological default, that default that is
necessary; and
• that logic that Lacan attempted to describe as ‘lack’ – which is
precisely not a mere lack, but on the contrary necessary: the
stoic quasi-cause.60
Technics, which thus pharmacologically constitutes the default
insofar as it forms the horizon of desire, simultaneously opens two
antagonistic yet inseparable paths: that of the drives, and that of
sublimation.
Apocalypse Without God
25
In other words, the two tendencies of the pharmakon are the
two tendencies of libidinal economy: these are, pharmacologically,
when on the one hand it produces long circuits through which it
becomes care, entering into the service of the libido orientated
through sublimation; and when on the other hand it produces
short-circuits, and is thus submitted to the drives, short-circuiting
and bypassing sublimation, that is, the binding of the drives. Long
circuits connect or bind the drives that are disconnected or
unbound by short-circuits (Hephaestus, from whom Prometheus
stole fire for mortals, is a ‘god of linkages’).61
It is the play of Eros and Thanatos that is instituted by this
pharmacology. That which is pharmacological is always dedicated
to uncertainty and ambiguity, and thus the prosthetic being is both
ludic and melancholy: it is ‘made of bile’. The liver of Prometheus
that is devoured by the eagle, that continuously re-grows like an
organic ‘perfecting’ without end, links technics not only to desire
but to death, and to its anticipation. It is between Eros and
Thanatos that what Hesiod called elpis is tied (attente, to await,
to expect, that is, attention, care, protention, both as hope and as
anxiety).62 Mortals, for whom elpis – condition of what Heidegger
called Sorge and Besorgen, the care and calculation of concern
[préoccupation] – is as ambiguous as the pharmakon, must constantly care for their melancholy.
And just as melancholy is essentially the fact of dependence, as
Freud teaches,63 so too the pharmakon becomes a poison when it
provokes dependence – heteronomy, that is, loss of autonomia, as
Phaedrus says: atrophied by writing, memory can no longer go
without its hypomnematon. But, as we shall see, there is no
autonomy other than as the adoption of heteronomy, that is, of a
pharmakon, so that dependence opens a milieu – that milieu that
Winnicott called transitional space.
A letter from Freud to Fliess indicates that addiction is originally inscribed in libidinal economy.64 Wherever there is dependence and addiction, there is a pharmacological situation that
makes it possible – the loved one is only constituted as object of
desire by themselves becoming a kind of pharmakon surrounded
by pharmaka that are fetishized objects. Nevertheless, ‘most
mothers allow their infants some special object and expect them
to become, as it were, addicted to such objects’.65
26
Pharmacology of Spirit
12.
Socrates and Asclepius
If the poisonous and addictogenic character of the pharmakon is
its deficiency [défaut], the becoming-remedy of this pharmakon
occurs when this deficiency is inverted, becoming that which is
necessary, the necessity for poison to become virtue, of which the
snake entwined around the rod of Asclepius is the emblem.
At the very end of Phaedo, in his final moments, Socrates
asks Crito to sacrifice a rooster on his behalf to this mortalbecome-god:
Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and do not
forget [kai me amelesete].66
No, it shall be done, said Crito. Are you sure that there is
nothing else? Socrates made no reply to this question, but after a
little while he stirred, and when the man uncovered him, his eyes
were fixed. When Crito saw this, he closed the mouth and eyes.67
Socrates, having drunk the hemlock, thereby honoured the god of
poison and of cure:
Asclepius was entrusted by his father to the centaur Chiron, who
taught him medicine. And soon Asclepius became somebody of
great skill in this art. He even discovered the means to revive the
dead. In fact, he had received from Athena the blood which had
flowed through the veins of the Gorgon; while the veins of the left
side had spread a violent poison, the blood of the right side was
beneficial, and Asclepius knew how to use it to restore life to the
dead. [. . .] Zeus, confronted by these resurrections, believed that
Asclepius had overturned the order of the world, and struck him
down.68
2
Pathogenesis, Normativity and
the ‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
13.
Anthropogenesis as pathogenesis
Rationalization, as first described by Weber, then by Adorno
and Horkheimer, subjects all circuits of transindividuation to
pharmaka of biopower and psychopower. Rationalization thereby
destroys reason as desire, because it essentially consists in a
process of generalized proletarianization, that is, of disindividuation, through the spread of short-circuits. It thus installs a
pharmacological situation leading to generalized addiction, as
a result of which, today, consumption has become a source of
unhappiness.
Contemporary apocalyptic feeling essentially derives from this
addictive turn. It is in this context that the Association nationale
des intervenants en toxicologie et en addictologie decided that its
2009 conference would take as its theme, ‘addictogenic society’.
In such a society, where consumerism is taken to its ultimate limit,
pathology stands in a completely new relation to desire such as it
is constituted by the pharmakon:1 a relation in which its drivebased tendencies are systematically exploited while its sublimatory
tendencies are systematically short-circuited, in such a way that
pathos has essentially become poisonous.
Pathos is affection in general, both as bond and as illness.
In the form of technical life proper to noetic souls, pathos –
or what is referred to as philia, eros, agape or fraternity, names
28
Pharmacology of Spirit
referring to the patho-logical condition of social life – passes in
an original and essential way through the pharmakon that is
intrinsically pathogenic: anthropogenesis must be understood as
pathogenesis to the strict extent that it is technogenesis.
The pharmacological consideration of technics leads to a pathogenetic concept of anthropos in which pathology must be thought
on the basis of what Canguilhem called the ‘normativity of the
living’. Life is a process and, in the course of life, life-forms
stabilize themselves.2 Within this process, the specific life-form
that appears with humanity is characterized by a variability that
induces the appearance of artificial organs within the vital process:
Bichat said that animals inhabit the world while plants are tied to
their place of origin. This is even truer of human beings than of
animals. [Man] is the animal who, through technics, succeeds in
varying even his ambient surroundings [that is, the world environment, the Umwelt] of his activity. Man thereby reveals himself to
be currently the only species capable of variation. Is it absurd to
assume that in the long run man’s natural organs may express the
influence of the artificial organs through which he has multiplied
and continues to multiply the power of the former?3
For humans the normal, the pathological and normativity all
stand in an essential relation to artificial organs (Canguilhem thus
placed the Freudian question of the ‘perfecting of organs’ at the
heart of this patho-anthropology):
Man, even physical man, is not limited to his organism. Having
extended his organs by means of tools, man sees in his body only
the means to all possible means of action. Thus, in order to discern
what is normal or pathological for the body itself, one must look
beyond the body. [. . .] From the moment mankind technically
enlarged its means of locomotion, to feel abnormal is to realise that
certain activities, which have become a need and an ideal, are
inaccessible.4
The normal and the pathological are not in opposition. ‘The
pathological is a kind of normal’, and in the experience of the
pathological, life is normative: it invents states of health – inventions that Canguilhem described as the institution of new norms:
Pathogenesis/Normativity/‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
29
Being healthy means being not only normal in a given situation but
also normative in this and other eventual situations. What characterizes health is the possibility of surpassing the norm, which
defines the momentary normal, the possibility of tolerating infractions of the usual norm and of instituting new norms in new
situations.5
A constant problem for readers of The Normal and the
Pathological is to know which propositions refer to all living
things, and which refer specifically to human life. Be that as it
may, life that has been technically extended opens up a new experience of the pathological and thus of normativity.
Broadly speaking, the health of life as variability or changeability is the experience of the ‘infidelities’ of its milieu: ‘Health is
a margin of tolerance for the infidelities [infidélités] of the environment [milieu]’.6 ‘[T]he environment is inconstant [infidèle]. Its
infidelity is simply its becoming, its history.’7 This infidelity or
unreliability of the milieu is related to what Bertrand Gille called
‘disadjustment’ in order to designate gaps between the constantly
accelerating evolution of the technical system (particularly since
the Industrial Revolution) and that of the other human systems
– social systems and psychic systems – all of which must also be
thought in relation to natural systems (geographical, geological,
meteorological, biological and physiological).8
From this perspective, technicity must be understood as bringing about a new ‘infidelity’ of the milieu – and of a milieu that is
neither internal nor external, a milieu of transitional objects – that
is, a changeability where the normal, the pathological and normativity develop according to a new logic. It is only within this new
organological context, insofar as it constitutes a pharmacological
context and is, as such, newly pathogenic, that Canguilhem can
conclude: ‘Man feels in good health – which is health itself – only
when he feels more than normal.’9
The health of the pharmacological being is therefore an excess.
But there is no excess that does not derive from a deficiency, a
default – no more than there is any excess that does not cause a
default. As such, this excess is both what derives from a disadjustment and what induces a disadjustment, because it exceeds the
normal, exceeds the fact of being ‘adapted to the milieu and its
exigencies’.10
30
Pharmacology of Spirit
This primordial inadequation, which Simondon analysed as the
phase difference of the individual in relation to their pre-individual
milieu, that is, their relation to themselves insofar as they are
a processual being inseparable from their associated milieu, is
also what for Winnicott constitutes creativity – which I follow
Simondon in calling ‘individuation’.
The healthy human being is creative, according to Winnicott11
– that is, as Canguilhem wrote, ‘normative, capable of following
new norms of life’.12 And Canguilhem concludes with extraordinary audacity: ‘the power and temptation to fall sick are an essential characteristic of human physiology’.13
There is no better way to say that pathogenesis is essential to
anthropogenesis – which is itself a technogenesis of pharmaka. It
is to this immeasurable extent that Thérèse Brosse could write that
‘the problem of functional pathology seems to be intimately tied
to that of education. The consequence of a sensory, active, emotional education, if it is done badly or not at all, is to instantly
call out for re-education’.14
14.
Proletarianization as disapprenticeship
and the sterilization of pathogenesis
Apocalyptic feelings derive fundamentally from generalized proletarianization, which has led to a global loss of knowledge of all
kinds: a massive process of disapprenticeship or unlearning [désapprentissage] on a planetary scale, imposing an adaptive society
that is inevitably becoming addictive (spreading the heteronomic
tendency of the pharmakon) and thus annihilating ‘spirit value’.
This loss of knowledge has been felt above all and in various
ways in the ‘cultural’ sphere, leading to various reactions, ranging
from France’s ‘cultural exception’ measures and international declarations protecting ‘cultural diversity’, to nationalist conflicts,
sectarian fundamentalism and terrorism. Nevertheless, on the one
hand, this loss of knowledge cannot be reduced to its cultural and
religious aspects, while, on the other hand, it is yet to be correctly
analysed – it has, ultimately, been to a very large extent
underestimated.
It is not simply that cultural particularities have been lost,
becoming either objects for heritage museums or for the curiosity
Pathogenesis/Normativity/‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
31
of tourists (that is, objects integrated into the methods of marketing), or symbols of struggles for so-called ‘identity’: it is also the
most elementary savoir-vivre, and savoir-faire in the form of arts
and skills [métiers], that are being dissolved, along with the academic and universalist forms of knowledge that result from processes of anamnesic transindividuation. The regression of local
savoir-vivre and savoir-faire never leads to the progression of
universal knowledge: it always results in the complete opposite. It
is this threefold deficit of knowledge that is referred to here with
the term ‘disapprenticeship’ – which is a regression into minority
in the Kantian sense.15
Far from extending the range of universal knowledge – if by
‘universal’ we mean a knowledge that has been internalized as
such, that is, through the experience of the circuit of transindividuation that constitutes it as such, and at the origin of which lies an
experience falling under what Plato called anamnesis, which, I
argue, aims at a consistence – the destruction of local knowledge
engendered by the standardization of ways of life has on the contrary entailed the destruction of curricular institutions charged
with the formation and training of long circuits constitutive
of disciplines and universal knowledge, that is, theoretical
knowledge.16
It was inevitable that this situation would incite apocalyptic
feelings: a pharmacological being that has become ultra-powerful
while at the same time becoming acephalous and uncultivated
could only be experienced as a blind power and an immense
danger to itself and everything around it.
This situation was induced by a mutation of the pharmakon
that, having become industrial, has become totally autonomous
in relation to the therapeutic knowledge that constitutes social
systems (in the sense of both Bertrand Gille and Niklas Luhmann):
the infidelity of the ‘technical milieu’ has reached the point that it
makes impossible the metastabilization of a psychosocial normativity and its transmission by that education that Brosse teaches
us is indispensable to the health of this excessive being who is
the pharmacological being – and who is healthy only on this
condition.
In terms of the vocabulary proposed here, this means that the
pharmakon, failing to serve the therapeutic knowledge that each
32
Pharmacology of Spirit
of the social systems cultivates, and failing to support any autonomy – neither of individuals nor of the groups that form the social
– on the contrary submits them to its heteronomy, a situation
systematically maintained and exploited by marketing and addictogenic society.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the disadjustment
between the social systems and the technical system (which is the
system of pharmaka referred to by Freud)17 underwent an extraordinary increase owing to the fact that technics, science and industry arranged and configured a new epoch, characterized by constant
modernization, that is, by structural obsolescence. This is what
was called ‘progress’, and it dictated the imperative of permanent
innovation, but it will turn out that the eventual outcome of this
disadjustment – after passing through two global military wars
and the so-called Cold War – is a global economic war imposing,
in the name of this war, adaptation,18 that is, the renunciation of
the normativity and the individuation that Winnicott calls both
creativity and health.
This process thereby engenders a sterile pathogenesis that is
both planetary in scale and extraordinarily violent. In this utterly
unprecedented situation, and precisely to the extent that, as
proletarianization, it leads to the liquidation of every form of
knowledge – savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and theoretical knowledge
– the pathogenesis grounded in the multitude of disapprenticeships
imposed through pharmacological short-circuits becomes massively toxic, because the pharmacological being proves incapable
of taking care of itself or its others.
15.
New critique and the pharmacology
of non-existent objects
It is as a rational form of care, maintaining reason through the
formation and training of deep attention of a specific kind, aiming
at the formation of apodictic statements, that is, submitted to
anamnesic, cumulative, non-contradictory and demonstrative
rules of transindividuation, that theory as such finds itself shortcircuited. But with it, and behind it, this regression affects every
long transindividuation circuit, not all of which are theoretical.
Pathogenesis/Normativity/‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
33
The theoretical is a modality of the experience of consistences,
that is, of motives that form into thinking for oneself, configuring,
as anamnesic necessity, a ‘true self’, and as such constituting
thought as creativity (in Winnicott’s sense).
Theoretical objects are transitional: they belong neither to
the interior nor the exterior.19 Hence the geometric point is not
within the exterior: it constitutes the exterior as space, but it is
not in the exterior since it has neither volume nor surface. For all
that, no more is it in the interior: it is not a ‘subjective’ or ‘psychic’
reality (as Husserl demonstrated so well in Logical Investigations).
Such objects, although they do not ex-sist (and Winnicott teaches
us that this is the case for all transitional objects), nevertheless
consist.
Philosophy has always believed that these objects must be
understood to be transcendental, that is, rational objects par excellence. It is no longer possible to qualify them in this way, however,
to the extent that the transcendental remains defined in opposition
to the empirical – given that this opposition has been challenged
by a pharmacological analysis that accords noetic virtue to tertiary
retention: in the pharmacology of spirit, consistence, existence and
subsistence compose, and do not oppose. And it is this consistence
that makes ‘life worth living’ as this composition.
The proletarianization of the theoretical dries up at its very
source the production of long circuits within transindividuation,
by bringing dissociation (that is, the destruction of dia-logical
milieus, or associated milieus, by proletarianization, which separates those who are proletarianized from their milieu, and which
no longer permits them to individuate themselves by coindividuating themselves) to the highest levels of human activity:
those levels in which understanding is organized with reason in
order to project ideas, that is, infinities.
The fundamental question for a new critique, that is, for a
pharmacology founded on a general organology, is that of passing
from ontology to genealogy without losing the ideas, which are
these consistences, and which are the most precious fruits of transitional space, that is, of the pharmakon of which care has been
taken – and with which care is taken of the pharmacological being
by the pharmacological being.
34
Pharmacology of Spirit
In place of the ideal beings of the ontology stemming from
Platonism must be substituted those infinite objects that are
consistences, reconsidered in light of the Freudian, then the
Winnicottian accounts of the infinite objects that produce all
libidinal economy – and that are also pure motives, in the sense
that Deleuze gives to this qualification. The ideal beings of ontology must be replaced by infinite motives.
Here, the question of sublimation must be investigated anew:
‘Freud used the word “sublimation” to point the way to a place
where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not
get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is.’20
Revisiting the question of this ‘cultural experience’, that is, of that
which constitutes the possibility of the noetic, the possibility of
autonomy, normativity and creativity as sublimation – all of these
being dimensions of what Simondon described as psychic and collective individuation – means putting it in its place, which is
transitional space, that is, pharmacological space.
Given that what ‘Freud and Klein avoided [. . .] was the full
implication of dependence and therefore of the environmental
factor’,21 Freudian thinking in relation to the question of sublimation remains insufficient. Sublimation, as condition par excellence
of autonomy, is what passes above all through the experience of
dependence that is the heteronomy of the pharmakon. And this
was also the issue at stake in the Symposium.22
16.
Knowledge as an after-effect of
pharmacological shock
This structure of pharmacological après-coup (which always
comes after pharmacological dependence, if not always too late)
is what, in the second volume of Technics and Time, I refer to as
the doubly epokhal redoubling23 – which is also the theoretical
formulation of the way in which prometheia and epimetheia are
arranged.24
Through this arrangement, Promethean pharmacology enables
the constitution of an Epimethean therapeutic – of an epimeleia
founded on a melete, which is itself empirical and technical, which
is thus always itself drawn back to its pharmacological prove-
Pathogenesis/Normativity/‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
35
nance, and which, as life of the spirit, is also the pathology of this
spirit, always threatened by self-rationalization, as shown in different ways by Weber and Foucault.
The first redoubling is the primary effect by which a new pharmakon, causing an ‘infidelity of the milieu’, opens an epokhe, that
is, a suspension of the programmes governing an epoch25 (the three
organological levels arrange psychosomatic, technical and socioethnic programmes, and programmatology26 studies the specific
rhythms, temporalities and spatialities these generate as cardinalities and calendarities techno-logically formed in relation to cosmic
programmes and physiological programmes).27
This primary suspension short-circuits the suspended programmes, and it is pathological above all in this sense: a lesion, a
wound and a weakness.
The second redoubling, the epokhe that constitutes an epoch
properly speaking, intervenes as a therapeutic, a technics of self
and others, a normativity established through a process of adoption,28 a new form of affection. And it too is pathological but in
another sense: in the sense that it forms itself against those models
of adaptation – that is, of disindividuation – that the first redoubling aims to impose.
This secondary suspension thus invents a new pathos – another
kind of philia that is also a ‘form of life’ – by creating new long
circuits from out of the initial pharmacological shock. The transindividuation that then reconstitutes itself consists in a proteiform
creative and sublimatory activity.
It is in this way that the pharmacological pathogenesis of
existences (of individuals) occurs, between subsistences and
consistences.
A society that does not know how to form this second moment
will be destroyed – in general through absorption and integration
into another society, itself constituted and reconstituted through
the normative and therapeutic invention proper to a new pharmakon. It is thus that civilizations form and disappear – civilizations
that are as such and above all mortal.
As for ‘us’, if we are indeed right to speak of an everyday
apocalyptic feeling, the point is not merely that we risk being
absorbed into another civilization: it is that there is no longer any
civilization capable of absorbing ‘us’ – even if the vitality of Asia
36
Pharmacology of Spirit
constitutes in this regard and according to all evidence a totally
unprecedented question, and perhaps a chance, which means that
pharmacological discussion must develop further and displace
therapeutic as well as pharmacological knowledge into directions
that are utterly original.
3
Pharmacology of Nuclear Fire,
Generalized Automation and
Total Proletarianization
17.
The pharmakon as automaton
Knowledge is always constituted in a pharmacological après-coup,
and as this après-coup:1 it constitutes a deferred time of the pharmakon and opens the play of its différance.2
Nevertheless, industrial pharmacology, through digital syntheses of understanding that enable comprehension functions to be
delegated to machines and devices, develops technologies related
to what in the 1960s began to be called ‘real time’, installing the
pharmacology of light-time.3 It is in this context that the question
appears of what Derrida ventured to call the ‘absolute pharmakon’: that of the atomic era, that is, of an age structurally turned
toward the possibility of its nuclear auto-apocalypse.
With the military infrastructure devoted to the unleashing of
nuclear fire, constituted by missile pads, output terminals of digital
computer networks for which the inputs are the radars and other
strategic surveillance apparatus guided by calculation systems synthesizing the functions of understanding – themselves connected
to a network of networks the architecture of which lies at the
origin of the Internet – the question arises of a pharmakon become
pure automaton.
Moreover, the industrial pharmacological age is essentially that
of automation. This begins with Jacques de Vaucanson and spreads
progressively as the proletarianization of the various strata that
38
Pharmacology of Spirit
form circuits of transindividuation. A threshold was clearly crossed
with the advent of nuclear weapons, eventually resulting in the
structural proletarianization of the politico-military commanderin-chief himself and, with him, of the sphere of politics as such
– eventually resulting in the liquidation of the political body and
of the regime of psychic and collective individuation specific to it,
through the destruction of political knowledge,4 to which the
telecratic becoming of democracy also leads.
Paul Virilio introduced this question in Speed and Politics by
showing how the 1962 Cuban crisis and, ten years later, the negotiations between Nixon and Brezhnev that officially aimed, if not
for denuclearization, at least at limiting nuclear weapons, had as
their genuine stake the preservation of the possibility of human
decision, and of avoiding the total automation (that is, total proletarianization) of military pharmacological systems.5
Beginning with the simulation systems for the radar/missile
systems of both East and West, however, these technologies that
were military in origin rapidly migrated towards management,
then towards markets and the most everyday social practices, as
real-time interactive systems, firstly in the spheres of the stock
market, entertainment and banking, eventually becoming practically ubiquitous. This was especially so with the development of
digital networks beginning with the Arpanet, which became the
Internet, weaving the fabric that is the World Wide Web, a new
pharmacological milieu if ever there was one, and as a result of
which carbon-time gave way to light-time.
This is why what Cornell University called ‘nuclear criticism’,
referring to a colloquium in which Jacques Derrida participated
in April 1984, carried to its apocalyptic extremes, and as a pharmacology of nuclear fire, a much more general question of the
pharmakon of which the stake is speed:
Are we having today another experience of speed? Is our relation
to time and to motion becoming qualitatively different? Or, on the
contrary, can we not speak of an extraordinary, although qualitatively homogeneous, acceleration of the same experience? And on
what temporality are we relying when we put the question that
way? It goes without saying that we can’t take the question seriously without reelaborating all the problematics of time and
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
39
motion, from Aristotle to Heidegger by way of Augustine, Kant,
Husserl, Einstein, and Bergson.6
18.
The spatialized time of the pharmakon
and the step beyond
If it is true, however, that the thinking of work and its relation to
capital essentially passes, since Marx, through the question of time
and its measurement, then without convoking Marxist philosophy
here, in this meditation on the questions opened by the nuclear
age and by the hypotheses of nuclear criticism, does this not lead
to a major geopolitical and economico-political choice – and a
choice very prejudicial to the crossing of a necessary step beyond?
For, ultimately, the ‘absolute pharmakon’ that provokes these
questions extends to the totality of social relations the Marxist
question of the measurement of time by its technical spatialization
(through what I describe as tertiarization, which is a grammatization). Daniel Bensaïd, for example, repeats Augustine’s question
– ‘If it is by time that we measure the movement of bodies, how
can we measure time itself?’7 – thereby recalling that capitalism
solves this question factually, through the technical abstraction of
labour time, an abstraction lying within the principles of capitalism as the short-circuit of the time of noetic souls,8 that is, the
short-circuit of the right and duty of individuation, and of what
Canguilhem or Winnicott named creativity or normativity:
In order that such measurement could become conceivable, we had
to suspend that which ceaselessly ‘transforms and diversifies itself’,
standardize the diversity of movement, spatialize duration [. . .],
capital reducing the particular time of savoir-faire [. . .] to abstract
social time.9
This time of savoir-faire is that of desire, even for the most
minor work activity insofar as it is not reducible to employment,
that is, insofar as a savoir-faire is creatively cultivated through it
(this is precisely what constitutes savoir-faire), and as contribution
to the individuation of a world constituting an associated milieu.
Proletarianization, on the other hand, consists precisely in a
process of dissociation,10 that is, of social sterilization.
40
Pharmacology of Spirit
It is thus desire and its proteiform transformations, which is
also to say, all forms of will, that find themselves short-circuited
by the technologies of temporal measurement that characterize the
industrial age of the pharmakon. These short-circuits now thoroughly traverse society:
the nuclear age gives us to think this aporia of speed starting from
the limit of absolute acceleration, such that in the uniqueness of an
ultimate event, of a final collision or collusion, the temporalities
called subjective and objective, phenomenological and intraworldly, authentic and inauthentic, originary or ‘vulgar’, would end
up being merged into one another – playing here with Bergsonian,
Husserlian and Heideggerian categories.11
Here there is no longer any reference to Aristotle or Einstein, and
we can well understand why not. But nor is there any reference
to Marxist categories, and this is far less comprehensible.
19.
Les coups. Living pharmacologically
The rich developments that emerged from this conference, published under the title ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, come to the
following conclusion: a critique of the nuclear age is not possible.
If nuclear criticism is necessary, as are new forms of study developed thereafter in the United States, what would nevertheless
make this new paradigm seem problematic is the fact that the very
category of ‘critique’ is now outdated.
According to Derrida, ‘ “Nuclear criticism”, like Kantian criticism, is a thinking about the limits of experience as a thinking of
finitude’, and, for this Kantian criticism, ‘the history of humanity
[is the] example of finite rationality’, that is, of intuitus derivativus
in relation to the intuitus originarius of a divine and infinite intellect,12 and thus ‘presupposes the possibility of an infinite progress
regulated on an idea of reason’.13 Given all this, nuclear criticism
‘would make it possible to think the very limit of criticism’:
This limit comes into view in the groundlessness of a remainderless
self-destruction of the self, auto-destruction of the autos itself.
Whereupon is shattered the nucleus of criticism itself.14
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
41
But what would enable an advance on such an affirmation? What
is it about the factual possibility of ‘the self-destruction of the very
“autos” ’ that makes it necessary, that is, right [en droit], to shatter
‘the very nucleus of criticism’?
Without doubt it is the fact that this autos, which only claims
to constitute itself in law [en droit] by positing its absolute autonomy as a principle, is in fact never constituted other than through
the accidentality of a pharmakon that is absolutely empirical, that
is, heteronomic – ‘autonomy’ always having its provenance (and
this would be a fact that could never be opposed to a right) in a
primary heteronomy, autonomy being therefore always relative.
This relative autonomy is a relational autonomy, and relational
autonomy (which is also to say, dialogical autonomy)15 composes
with heteronomy; it plays creatively with transitional space, as one
could also say. It invents norms in the enormity of pharmacological pathogenesis, like that child that is time.16
But if it can be granted that the primary epokhe that can cause
any pharmakon to short-circuit may also constitute itself aprèscoup as a system of care, reconstituting long circuits grounded in
anamneses, that is, in creative and normative individuation processes providing the feeling that life is worth living, that life is
worth the BLOW, the COUP, of being lived (which is something
that can never be proven) – for example, as the noetic activity of
a krinein that might very well have denied its pharmacological
provenance throughout its ‘metaphysical’ history, and as such
denied its grammatological constitution, but which in spite of all
that was not made in vain – then it remains unclear why ‘the very
nucleus of criticism’ would be condemned to ‘shatter’.
Rather, it is necessary to care for oneself, to learn to live pharmaco-logically, that is, normatively, affected and even wounded
as one may be by the infidelity of pharmacology – of the pharmacology of Spirit, which comes to blows [heurte de ses coups]
with the spirits of Valéry, Husserl, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno,
Horkheimer, Habermas, Anders and so many others – through
which its original pathogenetic content is revealed.
‘Caring for oneself’ here means not renouncing reason, motives
for living, that which makes life worth the blow and the pain of
being lived. This means: not renouncing the noetic that transitionally infinitizes its objects, which is what Valéry called Spirit; and
42
Pharmacology of Spirit
yet not ignoring all kinds of sublimation processes that have a
phantasmatic essence that can never be isolated, thus which are,
in other words, an imaginative activity coming from the unconscious and from its critique (in both senses of the genitive), that
is, from transitional practices through which it is projected towards
the real and via the symbolic, practices that can always be inverted
and become their opposite and thus, like fire, become that which,
as the origin of civilization, also constitutes the possibility of its
negation and its end – the possibility of apocalypse, that is, of
what must and can remain impossible.
20.
Wanting to deconstruct
The nucleus that, according to Derrida, nuclear criticism would
shatter, is the ‘transcendental subject’ that constitutes the three
syntheses of imagination, and the schematism that they prop up,
through which the categories of understanding are constituted –
the transcendental imagination that, according to Kant, precedes
images, that is, precedes the pharmaka that always threaten to
proletarianize understanding: to draw the subject back to its
minority. It was to counter this threat that the Enlightenment
wanted to conquer majority for all.
Now, what does deconstruction want, if not to constitute an
ultra-maturity [super-majorité] for deconstructors, who would
thus no longer be taken in by and no longer themselves repeat the
lures of pure autonomy? What could it mean to claim that the
nucleus has been ‘shattered’, if not that one will no longer be taken
in by the blinding effects of the pharmakon?
But does such a claim not amount to hyper-criticism? To ask
this question is to enter into and to claim to have undertaken a
hyper-critique of the limits of deconstruction (this is what I have
outlined in ‘Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction’).17 It is to ask
if such a programme is pharmacologically sustainable – if it has
not always already pharmacologically shattered, while not ceasing
to redouble itself in the après-coup of that which is worthwhile
[vaut], that is, of that which is necessary [faut]: the default.
Is it possible to reduce the pharmaco-logy of the pharmaka?
Evidently not. Nobody has said better than Derrida why this is
so. It is necessary to make do, or to make the most of things – that
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
43
is, to make do with or make the most of the fact that life is in the
end ONLY worth living pharmacologically, and in particular as
deconstruction of the logic of the pharmakon, as deluded [leurrée]
as such an operation can itself remain at its ‘nucleus’, if it is necessary to have an originary point of absolute singularity around
which such a nucleus is formed.18
For in any case the deconstructor – who regularly claims
the gesture of the Aufklärer in spite of everything that Derrida
asserts à propos criticism and critique19 – would be unable to
reduce the pharmacological condition that he deconstructs, which
means that he himself projects lures and casts delusions that he is
not himself able to see. These delusions are not necessarily those
of a promised or conquered autonomy: they can clearly be ‘negative’, and in some way hyper-limiting or hyper-inhibitors –
nightmares, apocalyptic discourses of all kinds, various attacks
of acute melancholy, chained to or stuck in absolute heteronomy,
the liver exposed.
Such is the insurmountable lot of pharmacological beings.
21.
The discernment of the lovable
What permits both the nucleus and its delusions, including those
that are ‘negative’, that is, self-destructive, what permits this point
of singularity at the origin of all deconstruction as its selfdecomposition in the face of the heterogeneous, is the libidinal
economy of an infinite desire for an infinite singularity on the part
of a singularity itself infinite, that is, always incomplete, but often
fatigued by its never finishing, that is, always susceptible to
regression.
This infinity, which distinguishes justice from the law and the
promise from the programme – and this is what leads Derrida to
regularly venture the term ‘quasi-transcendental’ – no longer presents itself to us as a Kantian question, but rather as a Freudian
question. It is the novelty of this difference that opens the site for
a new critique.
The consideration of this infinity cannot, however, be contained
within Freudian thought alone: it must pass through Winnicott
and through the transitional object, that is, the pharmakon. We
shall return to this in the following chapter.
44
Pharmacology of Spirit
Derrida claims that the nucleus of criticism shatters because
it equates critical possibility with absolute autonomy, thereby
excluding the possibility of a relational criticism. The necessity of
initially posing such an equivalence is completely understandable:
such is the way that philosophical critique has always been
thought, from the Platonic question ‘ti esti?’ to the Kantian questions (‘What can I know?’, ‘What must I do?’, ‘What can I hope
for?’, ‘What is human?’), and beyond. Such a claim (that ‘the very
nucleus of criticism shatters’ because critical possibility is equivalent to absolute autonomy) presupposes that criticism and critique
are conceivable only as noetic acts of a purely autonomous subject.
Derrida opposes to this autonomy an automatism of the pharmakon. Deconstruction is itself, in effect, a kind of automatic
process, beginning by way of a primary suspension, an epokhal
redoubling:
Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the
deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even
of modernity. It deconstructs itself. [. . .] And the ‘se’ [the self] of
‘se deconstruire’ [deconstructs itself], which is not the reflexivity of
an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma.20
What is this automatic reflexivity outside the self or the ego,
without ego, before all ego, if not the becoming industrial of
transitional space, and the institution, as grammatization, of a
rapidity that ends up bypassing or short-circuiting the psychosomatic work of transindividuation, that is, that leads to the
proletarianizing of everything that thinks and moves?
This automatic reflexivity, this reflexive system, is also Freud’s
‘perfecting of organs’ – and the primary movement of that pharmakon that is always already deconstructing the pathogenetic
being. This ‘spontaneous’ deconstruction – which, when confronted with the Derridian ‘quasi-transcendental’, it would be
tempting to call (wrongly) ‘quasi-natural’ – accelerates in the
industrial age of the pharmakon and seems to liquidate the very
transitional character of pharmacological space that has been
systemically proletarianized.
Neither grammatology nor deconstruction is sufficient to treat
[soigner] this: it requires an organology, that is, a history of the
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
45
supplement yet to see the light of day, deconstruction having
always remained encamped in the undecidable logic of the supplement – as if the automaton alone can discriminate or, as Deleuze
says, ‘bifurcate’, if not critique, and can only do so through the
tremors of its automatic crises.
Now, there is a second moment in this automatic reflexivity. It
is not a re-appropriation, which would be a return to the proper,
that is, a purification of the pharmakon, the elimination of its
poisonous side. It is, rather, the moment of adoption, which is
utterly to the contrary of adaptation, the latter being precisely an
automatic submission to the automaton.
Adoption, which is a process of individuation, the différance of
a doing [faire avec: doing, or making the most of, or making do
with] what is worthwhile, is hyper-pharmaco-logical, and constitutes what Derrida called ‘exappropriation’: an appropriation
always on the way towards the dis-appropriation of its alteration,
to the extent that its object is that of its desire, that is, of its
unconscious, and not only of its consciousness. But such an adoption, as a struggle against proletarianization – thus as ‘deproletarianization’ – necessitates a politics: it is a question not only of
psychotherapy but of sociotherapy.
Transitional adoption, which is thoroughly pharmacological,
constitutes the re-arming of a relational critical faculty, above all
as discernment of the lovable – and as the epimetheia of contemporary prometheia. It is an experience of desire, that is, of a
‘proper’ and a self or ego that always already projects itself outside
itself, beyond the self and into that which is never absolutely one’s
own because it is, precisely, one’s other.
But such a projection is also a reflexivity: a pharmacological
and phantasmatic mirror that no longer claims pure autonomy,
but which, insofar as it treats and takes care of [soigné] itself, and
through this takes care of transitional space, always affirms the
absolute infinitude of its object: its consistence – its promise.
22.
The displacement of the infinite
This is the question of the infinite and its interminable displacement. The infinite constitutes the horizon of the critical subject,
the nucleus of criticism. Rationalization, in the sense given to this
46
Pharmacology of Spirit
term by Adorno and Horkheimer and by Weber, is the finitization
of the world, and proletarianization is the death of God, that is,
of that infinity that constitutes the horizon of Kantian criticism
– as that which projects itself as motive of reason (idea) become
progress to the infinite for that finite being endowed with an
intuitus derivativus:
The intuitus derivativus of the receptive (that is, perceiving) being,
of which the human subject is only one example, cuts its figure out
on the (back)ground of the possibility of an intuitus originarius,
of an infinite intellect that creates rather than invents its own
objects.21
Now, Husserl displaces the question of the finite, of the infinite,
of their play and their opposition, by breaking with Kant on precisely this point:
God, the Subject of absolutely perfect knowledge, and therefore
also of every possible adequate perception, naturally possesses
what is denied to finite beings such as ourselves: the perception of
things in themselves. But this view is nonsensical. It implies that
there is no essential difference between transcendent and immanent, that in the postulated divine intuition a spatial thing is a real
[reelles] constituent, and indeed a lived experience itself, a constituent of the stream of the divine consciousness and the divine lived
experience.22
In the Husserlian eidetic, this opposition between the finite and
the infinite is ‘nonsensical’. The eidos of red, ‘the’ red, which does
not exist, is the condition of possibility of any experience of red;
it is what is aimed at in all red experiences, experiences of such
and such red, and this inexistence is an infinitude of red that opens
the indeterminate possibility of all finite reds. The Husserlian
transcendental subject can intuitively know (something forbidden
in Kant by the separation of understanding and intuition), which
means that it is a projector of infinite objects for practices themselves infinite – for example, painting or geometry. This is why
geometry opens the community of a we, itself infinite: the we of
geometry forms a circuit of transindividuation that is in principle
[en droit] infinite, and geometry is this principle [droit].
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
47
Derrida called this transitional dimension of phenomenology
‘spectral’ (and ‘hauntological’):23
[T]he radical possibility of all spectrality should be sought in the
direction that Husserl identifies, in such a surprising but forceful
way, as an intentional but non-real [non-réelle] component of the
phenomenological lived experience, namely the noeme. Unlike the
three other terms of the two correlations (noese-noeme, morphehule), this non-reality [non-réellité], this intentional but non-real
inclusion of the noematic correlate is neither ‘in’ the world nor ‘in’
consciousness. But it is precisely the condition of any experience,
any objectivity, any phenomenality, namely of any noeticonoematic correlation [. . .]. Is it not [. . .] what inscribes the possibility of the other and of mourning right onto the phenomenality of
the phenomenon?24
As strange as it may seem at first sight, this is also, primordially,
the infant’s experience of transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Such experiences ‘belong to the realm of illusion which
is at the basis of initiation of experience’:
This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect
of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes
the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life
is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and
to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific
work.25
In other words, the intuitive experience of infinite objects of
knowledge, that is, of consistences, is opened up by that projector
of infinities that is the unconscious – and reason is as such
above all a matter of desire. In the course of this experience an
economy is constituted which is that of investment in the object,
through which the object can appear, that is, be aimed at and
intentionalized:
In object-relating the subject allows certain alterations in the self
to take place, of a kind that has caused us to invent the term
cathexis [that is, investment]. The object has become meaningful.
Projection mechanisms and identifications have been operating.26
48
Pharmacology of Spirit
To which Winnicott adds this question: ‘[I]f play is neither
inside nor outside, where is it?’27
The hauntological and spectral structure of phenomenology as
analysed by Derrida, or in other words the structure of intentionality, presupposes a transitional space where the real, redoubled
through and in the encounter with the pharmakon (for example,
for the proto-geometer, first of all as surveying), redoubles itself
symbolically, and as the infinitude of the imaginary.
This is possible only insofar as a therapeutic is implemented,
making the unconscious speak and consist (the unconscious being
a condition of what Husserl called the faculty of reactivation, ‘that
belongs originally to every human being as a speaking being’,28
and that itself presupposes the capacity for anamnesis), and thus,
whether it does or does not pass through consciousness, it invents
another epoch of decision, krisis, that is, of discernment or judgement, krinon, of analusis, decomposition, and so on: all categories
without which there can be no critique, and which are themselves
only known by passing through critique.
There is, then, in fact and in principle, a double critique:
• that which operates the pharmakon ‘behind consciousness’,
unconsciously – that is, outside consciousness, but not yet
through the unconscious, which is a psychic agency, and not
merely a pharmacological one;
• that which operates consciousness from new motives coming
from the unconscious, because they have been made projectable
and schematizable by the redoubling of the critique induced by
the first moment of the pharmakon.
This second moment is the one that, concerning the pharmakon
of the letter, I have described in Technics and Time, 2 as a process
of différantial identification induced by the literalization of utterances and the new relation to the context of utterance as well as
reading in which it results.29 For in fact, the unconscious is dialogical, and as such related to what Julia Kristeva, reader of Bakhtin,
calls intertextuality.30 But intertexuality is only a particular case
within the pharmacology of the unconscious. And here it would
clearly be necessary to evoke Simondon’s concept of the ‘preindividual milieu’ in order to make these statements more precise.
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
23.
49
Deproletarianization
The process of grammatization – an expression that extends and
alters a concept taken from Sylvain Auroux – is the history of the
supplement that consists in a discretization, a discrimination, an
analysis and a decomposition of flux or flows, critical operations
of the pharmakon that, as the first moment [coup] of the primary
suspension, traverse pharmacological being. This includes: operations performed on speech (such as ‘written expression’ and
‘written signs’); but also on bodily gestures (the machine tool and
everything that leads to the automation of the production apparatus, speech being also a production of the body, but where the
denial of its pharmacological constitution led to the opposition of
body and soul, with the result that the corporeality of speech
became unthinkable); and then on light and sound frequencies that
stimulate the senses (analogue technologies); and finally operations of understanding (digital technologies).
What opens the Derridian problematic in Husserl is, strictly
speaking, the thought of the hypomnesic genesis of geometric
anamnesis, the latter becoming the reactivation of the ‘originary
intuitions’ of the proto-geometer. Although he thus shows that the
pharmakon of writing, and thus hypomnesis, is the condition of
anamnesis, that is, of the critique of the pharmakon and its epokhal
redoubling, Derrida himself never sought the possibility of a
second moment, that is, of a secondary suspension which, as
après-coup, constitutes new circuits of transindividuation from
out of the short-circuits provoked by proletarianization. Why not?
There are many reasons. I shall only examine two.
The first reason is that industrial pharmacology constitutes a
completely new configuration for which the possibility of secondary redoubling can be thought only as the object of an economicopolitical struggle in regard to the relation to instruments of
negotium, and such that it can become the vector of a new libidinal economy, of unprecedented processes of sublimation, and of
the invention of a new age of otium – an otium of the people.
Certainly, Derrida, like many others, and in the first place
Benjamin, strives to think the possibility of a redoubling of the
apparatuses (that is, of the industrial pharmaka) of artistic practice, as can be seen for example in those statements through which
50
Pharmacology of Spirit
the art of photography is considered with and from the photographic apparatus itself.31 But ultimately Derrida never offered
any thematic treatment of such apparatus in terms of its being an
element within a process of the grammatization of perception, a
process fundamentally tied to the discretization of corporal flows
and thus to proletarianization, and he therefore never envisaged
the possible proletarianization of art as the possibility of such an
après-coup.
The process of grammatization as source of proletarianization
is inscribed within a geopolitical and economic history, a history
within which the powers that take control of it (and first of all as
the power of the Church over minds in the age of colonization,
and through its missions, but also through the Reformation,32 then
biopower and, finally, psychopower)33 attempted, from the
moment that grammatization of the body made possible capitalist
organization and rationalization (in the Weberian sense and that
of Adorno and Horkheimer), to promote the belief that the loss
of individuation characteristic of each new pharmacological stage
is inevitable and incurable.
Confronted with such a situation, it is not enough to deconstruct metaphysics: it is necessary to fight against this ideology
and to engage a new critique of political economy. For, by exploiting the short-circuits caused by the primary suspension in which
a pharmakon always above all consists, these powers were able
to draw profits from them, profits that, in the context of an economic war become global, are in part reinvested in permanent
innovation, that is, in the constant production of new types of
pharmaka according to an ever more sustained rhythm inducing
a ‘torpor of [the worker’s] mind’, as Adam Smith put it.34 And
this torpor does not only affect the minds of workers become
proletarian, however, but also the minds of clerics – become
‘intellectuals’.
This is why the new critique – which is always historically situated (that is, pharmacologically situated), and which revolves, first
and foremost, around the specific traits of the industrial pharmakon inasmuch as its genesis proceeds essentially, functionally and
programmatically from the economic sphere (from negotium) –
must above all be dedicated to analysing processes of expropriation insofar as they aim to restrict différance to the shortest
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
51
possible circuits in order to gain the most rapid possible return on
investment.
This rapidity, which is not that of the pharmakon, but which
is made possible by the industrial pharmakon, leads to a pharmacology of capital35 in which investment is annihilated by speculation, the chronic obsolescence of objects destroying psychic
transitional investments as much as the economic structures of
production. From that point, desire – as the binding of the drives,
which are trans-formed through this binding (beyond the pleasure
principle and what Derrida called the ‘PR/PP stricture’)36 into
libidinal energy (which maintains and contains the drives just
as Hestia maintains and contains the fire of the hearth) – finds
itself unbound and decomposed. The ‘spirit of capitalism’ thereby
reveals itself to be the pharmacology most poisonous for the spirit,
in which there proliferates apocalyptic discourse, feelings and
tones of all kinds, and as banality itself.
Proletarianization is a fact in the face of which de-proletarianization is not only a right but a duty. It is a right and a duty for
the psychic economy as much as for the economy of subsistence.
An economy that is no longer capable of fostering the feeling that
life is worth living, and that essentially provokes the loss of the
feeling of existing, is condemned to collapse. And this loss of the
feeling of existing, which was expressed in these very terms by
Richard Durn shortly before he embarked on a massacre that
turned him into a celebrity, and who promptly thereafter committed suicide,37 was also described by Winnicott in order to introduce the question of the drives: ‘The instincts [the drives] are the
main threat to play as to the ego; in seduction some external
agency exploits the child’s instincts and helps to annihilate the
child’s sense of existing as an autonomous unit, making play
impossible.’38
In the epoch of psychopower, the exploitation of the first pharmacological redoubling emerging from the industrial grammatization of attention is what, by short-circuiting transindividuation,
tends to seduce and exploit the drives of the psychic apparatus,
which are thereby deprived of existence, that is, of singularity,
because the latter resists that hyper-synchronization of production
behaviour, consumption behaviour and conception behaviour (like
the ‘pensée unique’ found in economics, science and the political
52
Pharmacology of Spirit
sphere39) that presupposes the industrial production of the mass.
By this very fact, this exploitation (which is proletarianization)
tends to cancel out any possibility of a second suspension, that is,
of an Epimethean praxis of the prometheia constituted by the new
pharmacological space. Only such a praxis, however, enables the
formation of new therapeutic forms.
Taking care of this praxical and praxiological possibility constituted in a theoretical mode is a task that the noetic has always
been charged40 with the burden of undertaking – and, in particular,
philosophy. Such a ‘charge’ has always been a fight against that
which, in transitional space, harbours regressive tendencies,
whether political or economic, which is also to say, a fight against
that which, in the psychic apparatus, tends towards regression.
Such a fight can only be conducted in relation to the existing
historical and pharmacological context, and today, in the face of
industrial organization, this demands organological analyses
grounded in a conceptual apparatus capable of identifying the
original systemic dynamics that form between the three levels of
general organology.41
Proletarianization is in a very general way and across the most
diverse paths a capturing of attentional fluxes by the tertiary retentions that pharmaka constitute:42 it is a destruction of attentional
models that already in 1776 was being described by Adam Smith,
and it is precisely what Simone Weil described in 1934 in
‘Experience of Factory Life’, even if she did not thematize it in
this form. But it is also what happens to the consumer as the
capturing, diverting and distracting of attention, a distraction in
Adorno’s sense (the roots of which lie in Pascal), and it is equally
what occurs with the loss of attention that in politics results in
the impossibility of making decisions, leading to resignation and
to the exploitation of the drives incited through industrial populism – via which a state of chronic carelessness and negligence is
established, paving the way for extremely acute socio-political
crises. It is, finally, what proletarianizes theory such that attention
is no longer paid to consistences.
I have tried to show that this was already the issue in Socrates’
remarks to Hippocrates in Protagoras,43 and it was also clearly in
play in Simone Weil’s description of the months she spent at the
Alsthom factory, after her encounter with Boris Souvarine:
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
53
The fact that one is not at home in the factory, that one does not
have the rights of the city, that one is a stranger accepted as a mere
intermediary between machines and what they produce, this fact
affects the body and the soul; under this suffering, the flesh and
thought withdraw.44
Thought withdraws. This turning in upon the present produces a
kind of stupor. The only future that one can bear to think about,
beyond which thought lacks the strength to go, is that instant when
one finishes the piece on which one is currently working, if the
worker is lucky enough to grab such a moment.45
This withdrawal of thought and of the body, which is made
possible because the savoir-faire of the worker has passed into the
machines before which these workers henceforth find themselves
proletarians, also in the most general way deprives consumers of
their savoir-vivre, forcing them to constantly try to keep up with
the obsolescence of things. This is so because the milieu has
become fundamentally unfaithful, but according to a rhythm that
no longer permits the production of new forms of fidelity, or of
pathos producer of philia, or of trust, and it is the result of a much
larger process that, as ‘absolute pharmakon’, thereby deprives
political leaders of the very possibility of making decisions and
deprives scientists of the capacity to theorize their practice, that
is, to form long circuits.
And yet, this process is not in any way the ontological law of
a techno-logical second nature: it is a situation that arises from
the carelessness of thought itself before an automaton the deployment of which is confused with the fatality of an automatic becoming [devenir automatique], that is, a becoming without future
[sans avenir].
This process sets the pharmacological scene for a relation of
forces between spirit and itself, between two of its aspects, otium
and negotium – such that they henceforth appear to constitute
the tendencies of a libidinal economy that alone makes possible
practices of care, beginning with those that the love of a mother
for her child teaches it to bring into play, as a learning to live
that tends in our time to be ruined by processes of disapprenticeship that begin earlier and earlier and at the very heart of this
relation of care, and it is as a struggle against this, and against
54
Pharmacology of Spirit
everything that comes along to solicit and seduce the drives, that
the mother forms the primordial knowledge without which the
infantile psychic apparatus cannot manage to constitute itself
normatively.
A second reason that Derrida did not thematize the question
of the second moment [coup], even though he was essentially a
thinker of the après-coup, is that an obstacle to taking up this
question of the capturing of attention as control of intentionality
(attention being itself always a construction through a therapeutic,
precisely from the inversion of the pharmacological default into
that which is necessary)46 lies in the fact that Derrida, in Speech
and Phenomena,47 while contesting with good reason the opposition of primary and secondary retention, ends up practically abolishing the difference between primary retention and secondary
retention, rather than analysing the play of their composition,
something that prevents him as well from thematizing tertiary
retention.48
24.
After intoxication – the age of the après-coup
That the time for the après-coup has come is neither a fact nor a
right bestowed by philosophical decree: it is what is taking place
in society today as a new relation of forces – as the new creativity
and normativity that make possible a transitional space the characteristics of which in turn make possible the overcoming of the
functional opposition between producers and consumers. This is
what Ars Industrialis has been describing for the past five years,
and it is what the struggle for free software is about, and more
generally the philosophy of ‘open source’ and ‘creative commons’,
and the numerous unprecedented practices emerging from collaborative technologies, all of which foreshadow what we call an
economy of contribution.
Such struggles pose anew the questions of individual and collective investment, of property, of the proper and ex-appropriation, and of new forms of psychic and collective individuation
– which is also to say, of sublimation – elaborated through these
struggles. This is why Ars Industrialis unconditionally supports
free software activists: their struggle is firstly that of engineers and
Nuclear Fire, Automation and Total Proletarianization
55
technicians, subjected to the proletarianized condition that has
been imposed upon them by the cybernetic division of their labour,
which thereby ceases to be work and becomes merely a job49 (that
of ‘developer’, that is, a producer of code – within the process of
digital grammatization, and as its first moment).
Through their struggles, from out of which an individuation is
reconstituted, that is, a self, these ‘workers of the spirit’ are
engaged in the age of de-proletarianization – which is a kind of
disintoxication.
Today we all know that non-inhuman-kind in its totality, composed of pharmacological beings, that is, potentially inhuman
beings, must disintoxicate itself. Consider: the struggle to ban
smoking in enclosed public places (and where the sale of cigarettes
was methodically promoted by marketing on the basis of the
analyses of Bernays, himself inspired by his uncle Sigmund Freud);
the removal of asbestos from buildings, a material that until
recently was systematically used in construction; the establishment
of new regimes of healthy eating, in order to struggle against that
pathology that has become so prominent in industrialized countries, that is, obesity; as well as in a thousand other areas, and
above all the consumption and production of energy, the methods
of agricultural production, the size of the carbon footprint involved
in the transportation of goods, and so on. In all these cases
attempts are being made to find new models capable of freeing
people from the poisonous explosion of pharmaka.
But the true question is the colossal attentional disequilibrium
affecting infantile psychic systems, and the technological and
pharmacological stupidity produced by systems for capturing psychopower and by the situation of generalized proletarianization,
which spreads and generalizes a state of systemic stupidity that
becomes the law of drive-based capitalism and industrial
populism.
This irreducibly pharmacological being will never be rid of the
threat that is constituted by every pharmakon, and that is symbolized by fire as both technics and desire. This is why the condition
of all forms of possible disintoxication is the establishment of
a new relation to pharmaka as the après-coup of intoxication
and the process of spreading disintoxication, aiming no longer at
56
Pharmacology of Spirit
a transcendental nucleus of criticism, but at the everyday or
ordinary capacity for discernment of the extra-ordinary that supports the individuation of those who, each ensconced within the
mystery of their skill or their craft, their métier, and of its ministry
(including those of the mother and her child), have creative and
normative access to transitional space, and who thus learn – for
themselves and for others – why and how life is worth living.
Part II
Pharmacology of Nihilism
4
The Thing, Kenosis and the
Power to Infinitize
But he emptied himself.
Paul of Tarsus
25.
Nihilism and grammatization
Every society, whatever its form, is above all an apparatus for the
production of fidelity.
We have learned from Max Weber that capitalism transformed
the type of fidelity that had structured Western society, changing
it from a society grounded in the faith of monotheistic religious
belief to a society based on trust understood as fiduciary calculability. The crisis of capitalism that was unleashed in 2007, however,
a crisis the extent of which was not revealed until 2008, has taught
us that this transformation of fidelity into calculability, effected
through the financial apparatus, has now encountered a limit
whereby credit has undergone a massive inversion, turning into
what I have tried to think for a number of years as ‘discredit’, and
as a completely new form of dis-belief or miscreance [mécréance].
The subprime mortgage crisis and the fraud perpetrated by Bernie
Madoff are both symptoms of this situation.
This becoming, which is related to what both Weber and Adorno
referred to as the disenchantment brought about by rationalization, is essentially linked to a process of grammatization. This
60
Pharmacology of Nihilism
process took on a new dimension during the Renaissance with the
invention of the printing press, becoming with the Reformation a
site of unprecedented politico-religious struggle. In the course of
these struggles, the pharmacology of the spirit constituted by the
Book, and by books, and the therapeutic that such pharmaka
require, became the centre of a spiritual conflict underpinning a
new religious and secular therapeutic.
Although the Western pharmacology of spirit is certainly not
reducible to its relationship with the Book and with books, it is
nevertheless clearly shaped by the relation to these bookish pharmaka. And given that pharmacology in general is not limited to
what affects the mind or spirit, it is therefore not reducible to the
objects emerging from processes of grammatization, processes
that, through industrialization, affect bodies in general, including
their movements, perception, and the higher functions of the
central nervous system. Furthermore, these grammatization processes now also affect social relations as such, as well as the very
structure of life itself and the hypermaterial structure found on
the quantum scale, in the end integrating all objects, which are
linked together within an ‘internet of things’.1
The printing press, as the main factor in what Sylvain Auroux
calls the second technological revolution of grammatization, plays
a decisive role in the linkage that, at the end of the Reformation
and the beginning of capitalism, takes place between, on the one
hand, grammatization and the pharmacology of spirit, and, on the
other hand, grammatization and the pharmacology of bodies. The
printing press constitutes a mutation in the meaning of literal
grammatization: a ‘pharmacological turn’ is produced, which,
however, precedes the grammatization of gesture constitutive of
the mechanical age, and which consists in the submission of
hypomnemata to the imperatives of accounting, that is, of negotium. This transformation remains largely unthought, even though
the turn will have been the object of that major spiritual struggle
that was the Reformation as a therapeutic of reading, and that
was a temporal struggle as the implementation of an instrumentalization of accounting.
Within this turn, it is the relationship between otium and negotium that changes: this becoming passes through a new socialization of hypomnemata, eventually resulting, as the use of account
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
61
books spreads and becomes commonplace (a possibility deriving
from the massive reading practice in which the Reformation essentially consists), in the formation of ratio understood not only as
reason but as calculation – and does so well before Descartes, in
whom Heidegger sees the determining factor, whereas the Cartesian
event was actually an after-effect, and something like a therapeutic
proposition.
Divine logos becomes secular ratio: this fact lies at the foundation of America, and it is well known that in this regard Weber
draws attention to the historical meaning of the sermon in which
Benjamin Franklin pushed pro nobis to an extreme. This was
referred to by Mark Taylor in 1984:
The conclusion of this quest for salvation can be summed up by
the theological doctrine implied in the formula pro nobis. What
Christ means, claimed Luther, is grounded in ‘the fact’ that he lived
and died for us.2
This becoming is translated into the inscription found on the
dollar bill, which, proposing that ‘In God we trust’, is no longer
quite the same as a statement of belief in God.
This odd evolution of the verb designating the relationship of
fidelity of noetic creatures to their Creator would be incomprehensible were it not inscribed on paper money, which thereby
constitutes a unit of accounting. And it is this relation to that
which consists (and to He who consists) on a plane other than
that of creatures, a relation constituted in a relation to the Book,
that is hence affected by that which, in Nietzsche’s language, takes
the name of nihilism – Heidegger claiming that with this name,
for Nietzsche, it is the suprasensible in its totality that is put into
question. And we shall return to this point.
Nietzsche claimed that it would take a long time before those
who murdered God would be capable of comprehending their
gesture:
I have come too early [. . .]. This tremendous event is still on its
way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.
Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires
time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.3
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
If so, then perhaps we, some one hundred and thirty years after
this pronouncement (which dates from 1884, in The Gay Science),
have entered into the ordeal of this revelation as such. Today,
perhaps, the black night, and not only the shadows announcing
it, at last befalls us, and does so as that apocalypticism without
God that presently haunts the entire world, given that since 2008
the consumerist model, by collapsing, has clearly shown that it is
no longer only the fiduciary objects of logos, constituted by
hypomnemata, which, in terms of their meaning and their social
function, have changed in the course of the twentieth century, but
quotidian and familiar objects as well – and with them, and as
what at bottom they alone can definitively shatter, das Ding, the
Thing.
26.
Ding, things and garage sales
What is this Thing? We will not here conduct the thorough reading
of texts by Freud and Lacan that such a question calls for – but
this will be the subject of La Technique et le Temps 5: La guerre
des esprits. Briefly and provisionally, it can be said that the first
occurrence of ‘the Thing’ appears very early, in the famous Project
for a Scientific Psychology,4 and that according to Lacan it
describes the structure of desire,5 insofar as the latter consists in
a process of substitution thoroughly haunted by a lack, and where
all objects of desire refer to this Thing, which would be the substitutive expression of this lack.
One could say that the Thing is the object of all desire – but
this is an object that does not exist, if, as Lacan says, there has
never been an experience of this Thing. As Bernard Baas has brilliantly shown, das Ding, which does not exist, constitutes as such
a kind of a priori of desire.6 For the moment we can say that the
Thing, as object of all desires, opens (like theos in Aristotle) every
horizon of expectation, and as such constitutes archi-protention.
As for things – the Things about which Perec writes,7 and such
that they now form (that is, since the 1960s) the ‘system of objects’
made famous by Jean Baudrillard8 – they still constitute, until the
beginning of the twentieth century, the shared milieu within which
relations of fidelity are formed. Things tie, seal and support these
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
63
relations, as objects of inheritance, work, the formation of knowledge, shared activities, games, commerce of all kinds, and so on,
but also and above all as transitional objects: those of the infans
as well as those of sublimation.
Now, these thingly supports of everyday life, which supported
the world and the making-world essentially grounded in and
through this making-trust, have become disposable and structurally obsolescent as capitalism has brought into being what
Schumpeter theorized in his Theory of Economic Evolution,
namely, the chronic obsolescence of industrial products henceforth
furnished and swept away by a permanent innovation leading to
an inevitably self-destructive short-termism. Today, it has become
perfectly normal to see objects disappear into garbage disposals
and garage sales as quickly as they appear on the market.
(Hannah Arendt9 and Günther Anders10 both highlighted, each
in their own style, the major questions raised by this obsolescence
that destroys the sustainability of the world, and thus this world
itself. Their arguments, however, which must be revisited from the
perspective of their consequences for libidinal economy, largely
ignored the organological and pharmacological dimension on
which I would like here to insist, and therefore failed to open up
any political or economic prospects.)
Generalized disposability, which has today been imposed
throughout the world, and which affects human beings and businesses as much as the objects they produce, along with the ideas
and concepts these objects incarnate and disincarnate, has installed
a systemic infidelity orchestrated via marketing, and through
which intergenerational relations have been inverted: children
now dictate to parents how to behave – that is, what to buy.11
More generally, it is the entire apparatus for the production of
libidinal energy – that is, for the diversion and trans-formation of
drive-based ends (which are structurally short-term) into social
investments crystallized in the form of primary and secondary
identifications, which presuppose idealizations and thus proteiform infinitizations – it is this entire apparatus for the sublimatory production of libidinal energy that is being short-circuited
and destroyed, along with desire and its objects, if not the Thing
itself.
64
27.
Pharmacology of Nihilism
The false self of the consumer without object
All societies have always been founded on the constitution of, and
by the rule of, fidelity and trust (these being the roots of the fiduciary dimension in monetary economies). Over the past century,
however, and perhaps fundamentally since the ‘death of God’, our
society has been based on developing infidelity: the systematic
organization of consumption presupposes abandonment; it presupposes abandoning objects, institutions, relations, places and
everything that it is possible for markets to control, all of which
must therefore be abandoned by the symbolic dimension [le symbolique], that is, de-symbolized.
This is the reign of adaptation, as Lyotard highlighted in The
Postmodern Condition, that is, in the language of Winnicott, of
the ‘false self’, of flexible becoming, and finally, in the language
of Zygmunt Bauman, of ‘liquid society’: the motto of liberalism
has become the liquidation of all relations of dependence created
by organizations of fidelity. Moreover, these relations of dependence founded on fidelity are being replaced by an organization
of dependence grounded in infidelity – in this case, in a pharmacological dependence on expedients (all objects becoming such
expedients, that is, substitutes for a lack that is no longer that of
the desiring subject but rather of the addict, made dependent by
their toxicomania).
All this results in addicted consumers without object: for without
objects to which they can attach themselves, given that the object
is that of a subject insofar as it supports a relation of attachment,
they endure the ordeal of the emptiness and futility of the self,
that is, the ‘loss of the feeling of existing’.
Three remarks are necessary here:
1. The self as Winnicott tried to think it, which comes close to
what Simondon conceptualized as psychic and collective
individuation, is not reducible to the metaphysical self of
consciousness: it is rather the self of the id, that is, of the
unconscious. This is what must here be thought – and this
necessarily involves a consideration of Bateson’s theory of
alcoholism.12
2. The systemic destruction of fidelity inevitably induced by permanent innovation and necessary to the consumerist economic
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
65
system also inevitably implies the systemic destruction of trust.
No economic system can function, however, without an a priori
basis in trust that it is the function of the fiduciary hypomnematon to stabilize, but that it cannot itself produce.
3. Such a basis is necessarily constituted by something incalculable, an improbability and an infinity, which was given, before
His death, the name of God – and which also brought about,
in the same stroke, when the nihilistic destiny of rationalization
began to impose itself, the emergence of the Thing.
The systemic infidelity that destroys the transitionality of the
object has its basis in an infidelity of the milieu that lies at the
very basis of life. But in and as the après-coup of the doubly
epokhal redoubling – as the second moment of the pharmakon,
its curative moment, its normative remediation in the sense that
it is inventive of a new system of care – this infidelity of the milieu,
inherent to the evolution of life in totality and to the historicity
of prosthetic life, presupposes the formation of a normativity of
technical life, capable of turning the pharmacological pathology
typical of that living thing who can ‘want to be sick’ into a new
metastabilized milieu, or in other words a new space of fidelity: a
philia opened by a noesis. This opening is what takes care of
transitional space. It is precisely this transitionality of objects, and
of the milieu that these objects form, that is destroyed by permanent innovation.
28.
The first object of transindividuation
In the first volume of Technics and Time, I attempted to establish
that the anthropological fact (the origin of hominization) lies in
the constitution of an epiphylogenetic milieu: a milieu constituted
by artefacts that become functional supports of a technical memory
that is added to species memory (phylogenetic memory) and to
the memory of the nervous system (epigenetic memory).
In order to become supports of memory, however, and to be
internalized, and in order to constitute not only a memory but an
imagination (that is, a power to figure and to schematize), these
things, which ‘spontaneously’ constitute themselves into mnesic
supports, must also be supports of projection – of the Thing, that
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
is, of the default of origin (rather than of a simple lack) opening
desire to the infinite and to the infinity of its objects, objects that
substitute for the Thing, and of which things become the fetishes.
Such a projection presupposes the formation of transitional space
in Winnicott’s sense of the term.
It used to be that the question of the pharmakon, the condition
of the life of the spirit, even though it can just as well turn into
its opposite (and, as we say colloquially in French, ‘faire tourner
en bourrique’, ‘turn [someone] into an ass’ [that is, drive them
crazy]), was always set out on the basis of those hypomnemata
that are the ‘spiritual instruments’, which is also to say, on the
basis of the Platonic matrix of the problem of hypomnesis. Now:
1. The formation of things as epiphylogenetic supports occurs
well before the emergence of hypomnesic supports strictly
speaking;
2. A reading of Winnicott shows that it is a relation to an initial
object, that is, a transitional object, and an object that does
not exist – no more than there has ever been an experience of
the Thing – that the primordial pharmacological process takes
place;
3. Current child psychiatry, faced with the enormous pathogenic
effects of the immersion of the infantile psychic apparatus in
the audiovisual media pool, has over the past few years pointed
out, notably in the work of Zimmerman and Christakis, this
primordial role of the relation to transitional objects (that is,
to the supports of motricity through which a world is opened
up by being projected): the hyper-mediatized and hallucinatory
milieu bypasses and short-circuits the sensori-motricity that
Winnicott showed to be the condition of infantile
psychogenesis.
It is the synaptogenesis of the child that is structurally altered
by the immersion of its brain in the mediatized milieu. This modification of cerebral circuits is the internalization of a modification
of social circuits – for such is the brain: a relational organ that
plastically internalizes social relational systems, systems that are
themselves supported by the things, objects and artefacts that
weave human commerce as experiences of the Thing.
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
67
It is the internalization of social circuits within cerebral circuits
that enables the constitution of transindividuation processes, that
is, the formation of signification (of the transindividual). This
signification constitutes the material of what Winnicott called
creativity, which itself echoes what Canguilhem called normativity. And creativity is what produces meaning from significations
shared by those who co-individuate themselves through a process
of transindividuation.
During a transindividuation process, the co-individuation of
many individuals tends to converge, beyond the differences of
perspective between each individual, towards an attractor around
which a metastable state of shared significations forms. These
shared significations become the supports of interpretation, that
is, of the production of meaning – one and the same signification,
implicitly or explicitly accepted, can become in its play with other
significations the vector of a new meaning, which is also to say, a
transindividuation process for one or more new significations.
This movement of signification, within signification and beyond
it, a movement that amounts to meaning, meaning being always
tied to an emotion – signification is regulated and normal; meaning
is unsettled and normative13 – causes the transindividual to tend
towards the plane of consistences: from the plane where signification establishes itself as definition (usage, rule), meaning inverts it
by infinitizing it. Meaning only exists infinitely. It is in this way
that convergences to the infinite form in the transindividual, and
it is in this way that the transindividual opens existences to planes
of consistence of objects that, like the Thing, do not exist.
Meaning and signification nevertheless only metastabilize and
only deepen, only change phase, that is, only de-stabilize and
potentialize, insofar as social and symbolic relations, within which
they form and deform, are, ultimately, inscribed in neurons. Freud,
in his Project, tried to think the dynamic elements of this process.
Transindividuation is played out on the three levels of general
organology simultaneously.
There is no process of transindividuation that is not dependent
on exteriorization, which is itself artefactual and therefore technical – whether it is a matter of producing words, gestures, attitudes
or any other form of expression or production. Such expressivity
is, however, what affects and connects cerebral relational organs,
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
in the interior of which, in other words, traces form (verbal or
otherwise), and between which relations are metastabilized,
which contribute in a general way to the formation of social
organizations.
It could thus be said that the life of the brain to a large extent
occurs outside the brain. But it has always also occurred through
the brain – and pharmacological life has always been expressed
in diverse neurochemical activities. Contemporary ‘neurocentrism’, which massively ignores this pharmacological dimension
of life, has therefore been an obstacle to thinking the formation
of meaning and signification: it reduces the human relational
organ to its animal function – which is obviously an essential
function, but one essentially devoted to the problem of subsistence. Neurocentrism has thus been an obstacle to understanding
the noetic capacity of the brain.
29.
The brain as living organ of transindividuation
and the organology of spirit
Circuits of transindividuation, formed in the dialogism in which
human commerce in general consists, are founded on a relation
of primordial trust that, according to Winnicott’s clinical analysis,
is elaborated in early childhood through the experience of the
transitional object. This space opens up a relation to consistences,
that is, to what does not exist but consists: a relation to what
‘makes life worth living’. Which is also to say: a relation to the
Thing.
We have seen that the transitional object, that first pharmakon,
founds everything that in adult life will constitute the objects of
sublimation – that is, consistences. This presupposes the relation
of care as learning or apprenticeship, that is, the experience and
protection (by the mother) of that which does not exist, which is
neither inside nor outside, as well as the encounter with consistence as such, that cultural and sublimatory life preserves and
protects in its turn, and long circuits of transindividuation that
extend infantile creativity and concretize adult normativity on the
basis of pharmaka, pharmaka that may always also become supports of short-circuits, that is, of adaptive processes of disindividuation and of the formation of a false self.
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
69
The premature immersion of the child’s psychic apparatus in
the audiovisual pharmacological milieu short-circuits or bypasses
this relation of care, and with it, the basis – as the synaptic translation of the relation to the ‘mother’ or her stand-in – of the
formation of circuits of transindividuation that link a social circuit
and a cerebral circuit via the intermediary of a thing, through
which what Winnicott called a relationship of care is established,
and through which the fundamental trust of the child is formed
as the singularity of its relation to the Thing. This audiovisual
pharmacological immersion cuts the child off from the transitional
milieu and bars access to potential and transitional space, which
is neither inside nor outside but constitutes a relational structure
on the basis of which relations of trust and fidelity can be
established.
The brain is a plastic space of reticulated inscriptions organized
by the internalization and, if you will, the retro-projection of relations linked with and through the supports of epiphylogenetic
projection – through which nervous memory both exteriorizes and
internalizes itself, that is, weaves itself by passing through its
outside, by making a detour through a pharmacological milieu –
and such that synaptic short-circuits are also possible.
Transitional space is just as pharmacological as the audiovisual
milieu, which is of course also, and even pre-eminently, a transitional space. But audiovisual transitional space is purely and
simply toxic for the child’s brain: if it were to eventually become
curative this could only be on the basis of circuits formed by the
motricity of the infantile transitional object.
These remarks are intended to emphasize that the history of
the supplement foreshadowed by the logic of the supplement
(also referred to as grammatology) presupposes a general organology of the mind or spirit that forms and deforms itself under
pharmacological constraint and as a relation between the psychosomatic, technical and social organs that are linked together as
transductive relations, that is, relations the terms of which are
constituted by the relation itself. At the heart of this organology
lies a genealogy of the sensible – and of the relation to the suprasensible, which it is tempting to project here as the Thing itself
– a genealogy that frames a relation to consistences, that is, to
infinities.
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
This means that the organology of the brain must apprehend
this organ as the primary receptacle of grammatization – where
the question of writing and of its psychic inscription, as well as
of the inscription of verbal traces (Saussure and Freud), is posed
at a level below that of archi-writing, which is also to say, at a
level below the topic of the ‘quasi-transcendental’ that laboriously
accompanies it. Rather than focusing on the quasi-transcendental,
it would be more fruitful to focus on potential or transitional
space, which does not exist, being neither inside nor outside, but
which consists – and projects that which makes life worthy of
being lived.
Grammatization extends far beyond writing and logos. It concerns every process that ‘discretizes’ the continuous, notably those
of gesture. As such, it describes both: the proletarianization of
workers whose psycho-motor knowledge is discretized and captured by the machine, depriving them of their savoir-faire, their
know-how; and the artificial audiovisual ‘perception’ that enables
the analogical and then the digital discretization of the flux of
images and sounds – doing so, however, by creating short-circuits,
for example, those that ruin the relation of care and the formation
of trust that provide access to consistences, by barring access to
the infinities without which no trust is imaginable.
30.
As for the self – the pharmacology of the soul
As transitional support, every object is a pharmakon that induces
the pharmacological constitution of those who live pharmacologically (us, affected by the Thing), so that it may stretch and
sometimes tear the soul that is the psychic individual, with the
result that, participating in collective individuation, it may disindividuate itself and in so doing disindividuate the collective, that is,
damage it [abîmer], drive it towards the abyss [vers l’abîme]. For
if there can be no psychic individuation without collective individuation, the converse is also true: there is no psychic disindividuation without collective disindividuation. This is what Winnicott
called the false self. And this is in turn related to those questions
that Plato raised in the Gorgias.
Does the false self presuppose a true self that would be ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’? Clearly not: it is a transitional self, a relation
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
71
woven beyond inside and outside, and that must be thought on
the basis of a pharmacology of the soul. This is Simondon’s central
question in L’individuation psychique et collective: in that work,
this question is presented as that of the indefinite dyad, that is, of
a bipolarity that constitutes the play of tendencies throughout the
psychic as well as the social individual, which in Simondon is
presented as the ordeal of temptation.14
It is impossible to understand either the goodness or the evil of
the soul, which are constitutive and dynamic tendencies (the
dynamic of the drives, which supply energy to the libido, energy
which is then dynamically ‘diverted’), without taking these pharmaka into consideration, insofar as they can become either poisonous or curative and beneficial. Good and evil, goodness and
wickedness, are pharmacological arrangements, and a person ‘is’
not good or evil – but all of us become, every day, by turns,
according to fortune and mood (Stimmung), good or evil, representatives of goodness (that is, of nobility) or of wickedness (that
is, of ignobility: vile).
The pharmacology of the soul is what Winnicott described as
its originally transitional dimension, the transitional object being
also the means of falsification of the self as circuit, that is, of the
self as a relation for which the transitional object is the mediating
factor. The human situation is essentially relational, and the psyche
is formed relationally – that is, by inscribing itself on to circuits
of transindividuation – on the basis of transitional (that is, technical and pharmacological) facilitations,15 which presuppose mediators, curators, priests [curés] and therapists of all kinds.
As I have already emphasized, what Winnicott referred to as
the environment, that is, transitional relational space, is here the
crucial question:
Freud used the word ‘sublimation’ to point the way to a place
where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get
so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is.16
Freud and Klein avoided [. . .] the full implication of dependence
and therefore of the environmental factor.17
In other words, if there is a libidinal economy, it presupposes a
libidinal ecology. The soul’s goodness or wickedness, the false self
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
and the creative self, inhabit an intrinsically pathogenic pharmacological milieu. Or: psychogenesis is sociogenesis to the strict
extent that it is an irreducibly pharmacological technogenesis,
producing pathos and pathologies of all kinds.
31.
The spirit of things and the pharmacological
condition of nihilism
As environment the relational fabric is what ties together, through
transitional and pharmacological mediations, a physiology, a
history and a geography of the spirit. Circuits of transindividuation are circuits of desire, that is, circulations of intensities that
traverse and form by opening up [frayant] networks – just as paths
open up, and just as movement shows: by moving. Through
this, relations of attachment, philia, projections, identifications,
acknowledgements, obligations and so on, are tied together, but
also deadlocks, imprisonments, boundaries and borders delimiting
territories.
The pharmacology of the spirit is a pharmacology of symbolic
relations, but within which objects are the primary instances,
and where what the Greeks called the sumbolon is an object. Prior
to being constituted hypomnesically, the circuits of transindividuation whereby a mind is formed deploy themselves on the basis
of infantile transitional relations, and as objects invested with
spirit in the sense given to this phrase by Husserl, who referred
firstly to books, but extended its use to all common objects: ‘a
drinking glass, a house, a spoon, theatre, temple’18 were Husserl’s
examples of the way that familiar objects are always already spiritual objects.
There are, however, epochs and a genealogy to be established
for these objects invested with spirit – on the basis of the infantile
transitional object – through which spiritual and pharmacological
configurations are formed. Without this genealogy of the sensible,
without the concepts of general organology, and without the
process of grammatization that deploys itself within it, and that
constitutes the pre-eminently pharmacological condition of nihilism, that is, both the death of God and the re-valuation of all
values, it will not be possible to think contemporary kenosis – that
is, to overcome it.
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
73
Within these epochs, there are objects invested with those spirits
that, in Melanesia and New Zealand, create intensities that
Melanesians and Maoris call mana and hau. Mana can be fixed
upon an object, as if the object were able to carry the power of
mana:
Mana is not simply a force, a being, it is also an action, a quality,
a state. [. . .] One says of an object that it is mana, in order to refer
to this quality. [. . .] People say that a being, a spirit, a man, a stone
or a rite has mana, ‘the mana to do such and such a thing’. [. . .]
The word covers a host of ideas which we would designate by
phrases such as a sorcerer’s power, the magical quality of a thing,
a magical thing . . .19
As such, mana erases boundaries and constitutes in magical
society a kind of transitional phenomenon on the scale of social
relations – just as practices of sublimation preserve a transitional
space in adult social life, as Winnicott has shown. Mana ‘shows
this confusion of actor, rite and things that seems to be fundamental to magic’.20
What the Maori tribes refer to with the word hau, which is
transmitted through exchanged objects and which transforms
them so that only thus do they become objects, is an exchange of
taonga, that is, an exchange of items in the sense one says about
the items found in stores – if not an exchange of merchandise,
which is a word that Mauss hesitates to use precisely because, in
this case, there is no market.
There is, however, a constitution of relations of obligation, and
therefore the creation of a social bond through which the social
group is formed:
The taonga and all goods termed strictly personal possess a hau, a
spiritual power. You give me one of them, and I pass it on to a
third party; he gives another to me in turn, because he is impelled
to do so by the hau my present possesses. I, for my part, am obliged
to give you that thing because I must return to you what is in reality
the effect of the hau of your taonga. [. . .] What imposes obligation
in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing
received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the
giver, it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
a hold over the beneficiary just as, being its owner, through it he
has a hold over the thief.21
32.
Industrial kenosis and economy of the infinite
The seal hunter who carves his harpoon pursues the formation of
his transitional space and thereby enters into a relation with
himself such as the spirits destine him to enter – and with the seals,
too, insofar as they are themselves spirits. Is this relational dimension superfluous and reducible, or on the contrary constitutive of
the symbolic and the imaginary?
In sedentary society, far removed from this hunter, from these
seals and spirits, already urban but still ancient, things, having
become products of the division of labour, take the form of merchandise, placing those who acquire them into a relation with
other psychic individualities who have made them – the craftsmanship involved in what was created by so-called artisans configured
a worldhood that constituted a society that today we consider to
be traditional, even though it was urban. This division of labour
remained a relational space of transmission, according to methods
such as rules of life, and formed a ‘tradition’ insofar as these rules
were co-elaborated by those who lived them.
With the commencement of the Industrial Revolution, craftsmanship and handicraft [la facture et la manufacture] begin to be
replaced by the factory, where it is the machine-tool that produces
things: these things become objects of a process of technological
rationalization and mass production that results in standardization. This leads after the Second World War to consumerism on
a planetary scale, based on the model elaborated in the United
States, the consumer object penetrating society on the basis of
socialization policies that operate via marketing, which takes
away from society the possibility of defining social practices – of
which things would be the supports. This period that began with
the Industrial Revolution presupposes a process of the grammatization of production methods, bypassing the ‘thingly’ knowledge
of workers who thus become proletarians: their knowledge passes
into machines, and so too with the loss of their knowledge goes
the relational and transitional modes and methods of which this
knowledge was the psychic internalization.
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
75
Currently, a new milieu is developing, the digital milieu, and
this is a new stage of grammatization, bringing with it new relations not only between subjects, who have become ‘internauts’
and ‘digital natives’, but between objects, forming an ‘internet of
things’.
After the ‘death of God’, the pharmacological beings that we
are:
• discovered the unconscious and the Thing it harbours; and
• underwent the disenchantment of the world, which suggests we
should rethink kenosis.
The absolute reign of ratio as the finitization of the world tends
to reduce, via calculation, everything that proceeds along that
other plane constitutive of objects of desire in all their forms,
forming precisely so many figures and schemas of infinity: having
become a libidinal diseconomy,22 consumerist capitalism systemically destroys all objects of desire. And such objects, belonging to
the potential space of objects that do not exist, can spontaneously
infinitize themselves only by being kept on paths of transindividuation – this is what I call care.
Finitization, which bypasses or short-circuits these paths, is
simply a fact, and if this includes the fact of a consumerist economy
grounded in negligence and carelessness [incurie], it is also the fact
of the carelessness of infinitizing thought (that is, noetic thought)
in the face of a pharmacological situation that is awaiting a
therapeutic.
The thought of desire and of the Thing, which is not a thought
of ‘lack’ but of default, that is, of the pharmakon, is a thought
that remains yet to come: it is the question par excellence of a
century – ours – that has not begun well. It is the question of that
which does not exist, but which, inspiring trust, ties together relations of fidelity in this economy of the infinite that is the only
economy of true value, that is, an economy which is not just sustainable but in principle ‘to the infinite’ – and which makes life
worth living beyond the calculating fiduciary system which ratio
(reason) has become in all its forms.
After the death of God, that is, after the kenotic ordeal of the
fact that what consists does not exist, or in other words after
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
Freud, the infinitude of the object of desire points to an altogether
other domain, which is secret and certainly taboo, if not sacred:
the unconscious. It is this aspect of the psychic apparatus that
Freud’s nephew promoted as the foundational element of consumerism,23 and through which disenchantment was accelerated.
This may translate into the destruction of transitional ‘creativity’ (in Winnicott’s sense), or ‘normativity’ (in Canguilhem’s sense),
which are individuating and productive of desire, that is, of infinity. The systemic obsolescence and infidelity that is spread by a
grammatization which remains unthought and thus essentially
careless short-circuits the process of transindividuation and produces generalized proletarianization and disindividuation, draining or emptying the apparatus for production of libido (insofar as
this binds the drives), and through this the transitional, that is,
the pharmacological, has become a purely adaptive support, and
one which finds itself constantly becoming obsolete.
33. Rock bottom: techniques of the self and others
as the power to infinitize and to know infinitely
Disenchantment as the calculation of trust, and as fiduciary calculation, leads to the liquidation of fidelity, friendship, love, philia,
knowledge, arts and letters, in a word, of what makes life worth
living. Now, I have taken the risk, with Ars Industrialis, of getting
behind the following infinitive: ‘to re-enchant’ the world – that is,
to invert the kenotic horizon that is the nihilism of the prosthetic
god, of a pharmacology soliciting the drives, turning it instead
into a new therapeutic that re-invests the pharmakon as remedy,
cure, transitional mediation understood as transindividuation – to
re-enchant this world confronted with a new pharmacology constituted by the digital milieu, its relational technologies and its
completely revolutionary social practices.
What did we mean by saying that we risked this infinitive statement, that is, one that in French begins with an infinitive verb?
We wanted to say above all that no existence is possible without
infinity, and more precisely, without that which grants the power
to infinitize – which in turn presupposes knowing how to infinitize.
Nihilism is both an historical necessity24 and what Nietzsche
announced as the bottom touched by the pharmacological beings
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
77
that we are, like those alcoholics that according to Alcoholics
Anonymous will only want to cure themselves when they have hit
bottom25 – those who in earlier days were called sinners, according
to a Manichean conception holding that sin was the flaw conceived and suffered as what ought not be.
The bottom, or as it is said in English, ‘rock bottom’. This is
what is happening to us, and it is also the title of a wonderful collection of music that Robert Wyatt wrote, sang and recorded in 1974,
accompanied by trumpeter Monguezi Feza, a year after taking LSD
and falling from a window, which cost him the use of his legs.
34.
Libidinal ecology of infinite immanence
After the discovery of the unconscious, which is also to say, the
discovery of the Thing, the default (rather than a ‘lack’) that the
Thing proves to be is the pharmakon as transitional object and
condition of infinitization in the relation of care that is desire and
its formation, that is, the constitution of a libidinal economy that,
as the elaboration and transmission of knowing how to infinitize,
inverts the destructive economy of drives by diverting their ends.
The default becomes that which is necessary, that is, that of which,
like the Thing, we must take care.
It appears, then, that nihilism must be understood as a historial
process traversing and weaving a process of divestment [dépouillement] through grammatization, that is, a process of pharmacological kenosis. Grammatization is always above all the destruction
of circuits of desire, that is, the destruction of the power to
infinitize and of the knowledge that this presupposes and makes
possible.26 But it is also always what constitutes new knowledge
and new powers, après-coup, as new therapeutics emerge from
the new pharmacology in which a new stage of grammatization
consists.
During the monotheistic age, faced with a pharmakon understood as sin, the sinner would think and live infinity as transcendence, that is, as supreme existence and as the ontotheology of
the summum ens. The re-valuation of all values inscribes the possibility of infinitization – the power to infinitize and infinitizingknowledge – in an immanence without transcendence, yet as a
new horizon of consistences.
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Pharmacology of Nihilism
If Nietzsche argued that with the death of God so too the
suprasensible is liquidated, this was because he saw it as related
to the intelligible that Plato opposed to the sensible. And in
Christian ontotheology the intelligible, as a world-beyond founded
in the realism of ideas, becomes the existence of God, that is, of
the improbable that it is still a matter of proving exists, at the risk
of ruining all consistence.
After Freud, the infinite becomes the object of desire that clearly
does not exist – and that, if one can put it like this, does not exist
infinitely. Such is das Ding: the Thing. After the twentieth century
– which exploited the Freudian discovery to the point of emptying
it of its very object, the kenosis of the transitional object being
engulfed and dissolved by the obsolescence of all things; and in
the pharmacological context of digital transitional space characteristic of the twenty-first century – it is the economy of the object
of desire that must be reconstructed as libidinal ecology, from and
as a new critique of the politico-libidinal economy of sublimation
and of contemporary transitional milieus.27
The question of the infinite has become the question par excellence of political economy.
When the question of the infinite becomes that of immanence
itself – insofar as, being both symbolic and imaginary, it is constituted by a process of transindividuation of which things, as
transitional objects, that is, as pharmaka, are the condition of
possibility (of consistence) as well as of impossibility (of inexistence) – then the question of desire and of the care taken of its
object, of which philia, eros, agape, charis, love and sublimation
are names, and the supports of the fidelity that gathers them
together, this question of desire becomes not only the object of
libidinal economy understood as a therapeutic organization of
pharmacology, but the question of a new critique of political
economy conceived as a pharmacology of capital.
Part III
Pharmacology of Capital
5
Economizing Means
Taking Care: The Three
Limits of Capitalism
35.
Psychic apparatus and social apparatus in the
‘attention economy’
The future of the planet must be thought from the question of
psychopower characteristic of control societies, the effects of
which have become massive and destructive. Globalized psychopower is the systematic organization of the capture of attention
made possible by the psychotechnologies that have developed
with radio (1920), television (1950) and digital technologies
(1990). It has spread across the surface of the planet via several
forms of networks, producing a constant industrial channelling of
attention, and resulting in a new phenomenon: a massive destruction of attention, referred to by nosologists in the United States
as ‘attention deficit disorder’. This destruction of attention is a
particular, and particularly severe, case of the destruction of libidinal energy through which the capitalist libidinal economy is
destroying itself.
Attention is the reality of individuation understood in Simondon’s
sense, that is, insofar as it is always both psychic and collective.
Attention is the psychic faculty that allows us to concentrate on
an object, that is, to give ourselves over to an object, but it is also
the social faculty that allows us to take care of this object – or of
another, or of the representative of another, or of the object of the
other: attention is also the name of that civility that is grounded
in philia, that is, socialized libidinal energy.
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This is why the destruction of attention implies the destruction
of both the psychic apparatus and the social apparatus (formed
through collective individuation), insofar as the latter constitutes
a system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care.
Such a system of care is also a libidinal economy, through which
a psychic apparatus and a social apparatus are connected together,
but today we find that technological apparatus is destroying this
economy. And, as we shall see, this also involves psychotechnological and sociotechnological apparatus. In other words, this
question relates to what I refer to as ‘general organology’.
The main question that arises from attention deficit disorder,
and from the results of the destructive effects of the exploitation
of attention by psychopower, derives from the fact that the infantile psychic apparatus is weakened and made fragile, as is that
sociability grounded in philia. Now, this premature liquidation of
libidinal economy also destroys industrial capitalism insofar as it
is based on investment: the organ of psychopower is marketing,
which is the armed wing of a financialized capitalism that has
become essentially speculative.
36.
The grammatization of transindividuation itself
and the passage from psychotechnologies to
sociotechnologies
The enormous financial crisis that has shaken the whole world,
and the various ongoing and ever more disturbing effects
resulting from the ‘remedies’ tried by governments, are all the
disastrous result of the hegemony of the short term, of which
the destruction of attention is both an effect and a cause. The
loss of attention is a loss of the capacity to project into the
long term (that is, to invest in objects of desire) that systemically
affects the psychic apparatus of those consumers manipulated by
psychopower, but equally affects the manipulators themselves:
speculators are typically people who pay little attention to the
objects of their speculation – and who, moreover, take little care
of them.
The actions of speculators have effects on the multitude of
consciousnesses that suffer – directly or indirectly – the effects of
Economizing Means Taking Care
83
speculation through the psychotechnological systems that capture
their attention. These consciousnesses find themselves ever more
enclosed within a lack of attention and care, that is, within the
short term. And this justifies a posteriori the actions of the speculator: the speculative act is performative in the sense given to this
word by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. In
this way a system based on the short term is established – bringing
about a vicious circle that destroys attention.
It is in this context that a colossal environmental crisis rages
on, a crisis that has been placed on the top rung of global concern
(Besorgen) and attention (Sorge) by the Nobel Academy. A third
limit of capitalism has thereby been discovered and globally recognized – after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the
tendency of libidinal energy to fall (which is the direct result of
the destruction of attention).
In this context of environmental crisis, which suddenly makes
the need for long-term thinking seem so clear, that is, the need to
re-elaborate a politics of investment – at the precise moment when
an enormous financial crisis has exposed the calamity of the speculative and short-termist organization induced by the financialization that destroys attention – new operations of spectacular
industrial concentration are being implemented or prepared:
Google has drawn most of the focus in this regard, by having
crossed an immeasurable threshold to the industrialization of
psychic and collective memory.
The goal of such operations is to take control of socio-digital
networks deploying those new ways of capturing and forming
psychic and collective attention that are ‘social networks’: a new
age of reticulation is being implemented, and it constitutes a new
stage of the grammatization process. In this stage, it is the mechanisms of transindividuation itself that are grammatized, that is,
formalized and made reproducible, and therefore capable of being
calculated and automated. Now, transindividuation is the way in
which psychic individuations are meta-stabilized as collective
individuation: transindividuation is the operation of the fully
actualized socialization of the psychic.
With the advent of ‘social networks’ the question of attentional
technologies has manifestly and explicitly become the question
of transindividuation technologies. Transindividuation is now
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Pharmacology of Capital
formalized through the use of psychic individuation technologies
originally conceived in order to achieve collective individuation,
spectacularly and organologically confirming the Simondonian
analysis according to which psychic individuation is also and
immediately collective individuation. This involves technologies of
indexation and annotation, as well as tags and modelled traces,1
wikis and collaborative technologies in general.2
Here, a reading of Foucault is especially necessary and productive: Foucault showed in his reading of the correspondence between
Seneca and Lucilius that techniques of the self, as techniques of
psychic individuation, are always already techniques of collective
individuation. Foucault was unable to foresee, however, the question of psychopower: marketing, beginning with the emergence of
the programme industries, has transformed the psychotechniques
of the self and psychic individuation into industrial psychotechnologies of transindividuation, that is, into psychotechnologies
woven through networks, and has done so as the organization of
an industrial reticulation of transindividuation that short-circuits
and bypasses traditional and institutional social networks.
Having destroyed traditional social networks, psychotechnologies have become sociotechnologies, and they tend to form
themselves into a new milieu and a new reticular condition of
transindividuation that grammatizes new forms of social
relations.
37.
Tertiary retention and transindividuation
In order to analyse these developments, which constitute the specific context in relation to which it is necessary and possible to
think a future for the planet, we must return to the question of
what attention actually is. Psychic and collective individuation is
essentially what forms attention insofar as it is necessarily both
psychic and social, and attention is what results from the relation
between retention and protention in the Husserlian sense of these
terms (what Husserl called intentional consciousness is what I am
calling attention).3 Now, this relation between retention and protention, the result of which is attention, is always mediated by
tertiary retention – of which psychotechnologies and sociotechnologies are instances.
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85
If we are to complete the analysis in which Husserl distinguished primary retention from secondary retention, we must refer
to tertiary retention. Primary retention is, for example, what
occurs when someone listens to another person speak and, relating
the verb used by the speaker back to the subject that preceded it,
a word that is no longer being perceived directly, the listener
maintains this subject in the verb, which constitutes the maintenance of the speaker’s discourse as well as the listener’s attention:
the listener conjugates the subject to the verb, with a view to
projecting this action designated by the verb towards its complement. This projection is a protention, that is, an expectation.
What Husserl called primary retention is this operation that
consists in retaining one word within another word (an operation
that Husserl analysed by studying the way that in a melody one
note retains within it the note that preceded it, and projects
forward the expectation of a further note, which Leonard Meyer
described as an expectation). This operation consists, then, in
retaining a word that is no longer present: the beginning of the
sentence has already been uttered and is as such already past, and
yet it is still present in the meaning that unfolds as speech.
We must distinguish the operation that is primary retention
from secondary retention. A secondary retention is a memory,
something that belongs to a past that has passed by (it is thus a
former primary retention), whereas primary retention still belongs
to the present, to a passing present: it is the very passage and as
such the direction of the present – thus also its meaning, in terms
of its sense of direction. Memory as secondary retention is also
what enables us to select from among possibilities in primary
retention: primary retention is a primary selection, and the criteria
for this selection are furnished by secondary retention (by memories, that is, individual experience).
Imagine we are at a conference, and that I am delivering the
sentences that are written here on this page. This was in fact the
case in April 2008 at the University at Albany, State University of
New York, where I was invited by Tom Cohen for a symposium
organized by the Institute on Critical Climate Change,4 at which
I made the following remarks.
You are all listening to me, but each of you hears what I say
differently, and this is because your secondary retentions are
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singular: your pasts are singular. By the same token, your understanding of what I say is each time singular: the meaning you
assign to my discourse, through which you individuate yourself
with my discourse, is each time singular – and this is the case
because you are singularly selecting primary retentions of the
discourse I am delivering to you, a discourse through which I am
trying to retain and maintain your attention.
If, however, you were now able to repeat this whole speech
that you have just listened to, if, for example, you had recorded
it on to a memory stick as an MP3 file, you would obviously
bring about new primary retentions, and you would do so in
relation to the preceding primary retentions that have in the
meantime become secondary retentions. You would therefore
reconsider the meaning of this discourse as you had previously
constituted it: through this repetition you would produce a
difference in meaning, through which this meaning reveals
itself to be more a process than a state. More precisely, it reveals
itself to be the process of your own individuation arranging itself
with the individuation that this discourse testifies to, which in
this case is my own individuation. You would thereby form
retentional circuits that are at the origin of new circuits of
transindividuation.
Be that as it may, what enables the repetition of a speech, in
the form for example of an MP3 recording, is tertiary retention,
just as the written text that I am now reading to you allows me
to repeat a discourse that I conceived elsewhere, at an earlier time:
it is a hypomnesic pharmakon. Such a pharmakon enables attentional effects to be produced, that is, retentional and protentional
arrangements, the existence of which entirely justifies the definition of this pharmakon as a psychotechnical system or device.
Such a device allows, more precisely, the control of retentional
and protentional arrangements with the aim of producing
attentional effects.
Such effects are also those analysed by Husserl as the condition
of the origin of geometry – where writing is what enabled the
formation of rational types of primary and secondary retention,
through which long circuits of transindividuation could be formed,
including those denounced by Plato in the Phaedrus and in Gorgias
on the grounds that these intermediate, tertiary, hypomnesic
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87
retentions make it possible to bypass or short-circuit the anamnesic work of thinking.
Tertiary retentions are therefore mnemotechnical forms of the
exteriorization of psychic life constituting traces organized through
retentional devices and systems (of which the systems described
by Foucault in The Order of Things, The Archaeology of
Knowledge and Discipline and Punish are cases), and attention is
conditioned by these retentional systems – which characterize
systems of care, as therapeutic systems of which retentional systems
are the pharmacological basis.
Now, retentional systems and devices are at present entering
into a new distributed organization that in fact represents a major
rupture with the preceding organization of industrial society.5 This
rupture represents a crossroads in relation to which a new industrial politics must make choices and draw consequences, and it is
only on this basis that new solutions may be found for the problems of the hyperindustrial world. This is an opportunity but at
the same time a new danger (it is induced by a new pharmakon),
and it has arisen at the very moment that capitalism finds
itself confronted by three limits.
38.
The three limits of capitalism
and the question of care
Capitalism encountered its first two limits at the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century respectively.
The Industrial Revolution, as the implementation of the capitalist system of production, continued the process of grammatization
through which tertiary retentions were formed – including psychotechniques – via apparatus devised to control gestures. This
apparatus, in the form of machine-tools, enabled the elimination
of the savoir-faire, the skill and know-how, of workers, and
thereby made possible the achievement of immense gains in productivity and new levels of prosperity, but it nevertheless encountered, beyond the misery and poverty it produced in the form of
the proletariat, that limit analysed by Marx as the tendency of
the profit rate to fall.6
As a way of struggling against this limit of capitalist development, the ‘American way of life’ invented the figure of the
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consumer whose libido is systematically solicited in order to counteract the threat of overproduction, which is the concrete social
expression of the tendency of the profit rate to fall. This channelling of the libido that works by capturing and harnessing attention
ends in the elimination of the savoir-vivre of consumers, through
the massive development of service-based societies that discharge
them of the obligations of their own existences, that is, of their
responsibilities as mature adults. In the end, this results in the
elimination of their own desire as well as the desire of their own
children, to the strict extent that the latter can no longer identify
with them, both because these parents no longer know anything,
and are no longer responsible for anything, having themselves
become overgrown children, and also because the process of
primary identification has been short-circuited by the psychopower of psychotechnologies.
This destruction of desire (which is also to say, of attention and
care), which leads to a drive-based economy, that is, an essentially
destructive economy, is a new limit encountered by capitalism,
this time not only as mode of production but also as mode of
consumption defined as way of life, that is, as biopower become
psychopower.
A third limit is now imposing itself, deriving from the fact that
the development of the industrial way of life, inherited from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has become toxic not only on
the plane of minds and libido, but also on the geophysical and
biological plane.
This third limit can only be overcome on the condition of
inventing a way of life that constitutes a new way of taking care
of the world, a new way of paying attention to it, through the
invention of therapeutics: techniques, technologies and sociopharmacological apparatuses of the formation of attention corresponding to the organological specificities of our age. They must
correspond to the specificities of transindividuation technologies
that will form the infrastructure of an industrial system itself
functioning in an endogenous fashion as a system of care, making
care its ‘value chain’, that is, its economy – and thereby reconnecting to the original meaning of the word ‘economy’, for to
economize is to take care.
Economizing Means Taking Care
39.
89
Reinvestment
Western societies are undergoing the effects of the fact that technologies that originated from their own mode of production have
now been exported, giving rise to industrial competitors (Paul
Valéry already reflected on the consequences of this, even though
at that time they remained yet to come) through a movement
towards financialization that inevitably unleashes a global
economic war.
In this new form of war, it is no longer a matter of defending
society against an ‘enemy’, whether external or internal. Rather,
it is a matter of defending society against a process that ruins time,
that is, the horizon of the long term, and the possibility of projecting this horizon and at the same time projecting intergenerational
relations – which are the condition of the attention given to objects
of desire. This process is spinning out of control at the very
moment that the effects of the three limits of capitalism are
combining.
Global competition has been intensified by financialization,
resulting in the destruction of the complex equilibrium that made
it possible for the development of capitalism to also involve the
social development of industrial democracies via the Keynesian
organization of the redistribution of wealth under the authority
of a welfare state. And it is in the context of the resulting economic
war that marketing has become, as Gilles Deleuze wrote, ‘the
instrument of social control’ in control societies, and that the
fall in libidinal energy has suddenly worsened.
It is in this way that, in terms of consumption and at the end
of the twentieth century, the capitalist way of life became an addictive process less and less capable of bringing sustainable satisfaction. The result has been high levels of discontent in relation to
consumption, which has replaced culture, that is, care, given that
culture proceeds from cults of all types, that is, attachments to
objects that, taken as a totality, constitute a system of care. It is
in this context that Jenny Uechi could write in Abdusters:
According to recent surveys by sociologist Juliet Schor, 81 per cent
of Americans believe their country is too focused on shopping,
while nearly 90 per cent believe it is too materialistic.
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We all know that in no case will this new global capitalism be
able to develop by reproducing the modes of production and
consumption that have been characteristic of Western, Japanese
and Korean industrial democracies. For to export this way of life
would be to also export the growth in the production of toxins
of all kinds to the great majority of the planetary population, the
result of which could well lead to the disappearance of the human
race – to say nothing of the destruction of psychic apparatuses
that also has effects that spread as quickly as this ‘growth’, which
is in reality, and for this very reason, a mis-growth [mécroissance].
The new global capitalism will be capable of renewing its energies
only on the condition that it invents a new logic and new objects
of investment – and here the word investment must be taken in
the widest sense: in the sense both of industrial economy and
libidinal economy.
40.
What is ‘energy policy’?
In a text devoted to European energy policy, Jeremy Rifkin,7
placing his discourse under the sign of the ‘end of the age of oil’,
asks how we are to ensure ‘sustainable development’. He does so,
however, without ever posing the problem of mis-growth, that is,
‘growth’ that destroys desire, and that disindividuates producers
as well as consumers, ruining the dynamism of what Max Weber
called the spirit of capitalism, a spirit that must be understood
as a libidinal energy that can be constituted only through the
kinds of sublimation processes that are now being annihilated by
marketing.
Although Rifkin never raises these questions (which were nevertheless the horizon of his works, The European Dream and
The Age of Access), he does emphasize, in relation to the age
of oil and of fossil fuels generally, that there are growing ‘external costs’ (which economists refer to as negative externalities).
He does, then, implicitly refer to the third limit encountered by
a capitalism that has become an effectively globalized technological system of production and consumption. In this context,
he writes, there may be a residual stock of fossil energy that we
will need to learn to exploit to the maximum, that is, in the
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91
most economical way possible, but at the same time other processes for the production and consumption of energy will need
to be implemented: ‘Looking to the future, every government
will need to explore new energy paths and establish new economic models.’8
It is indeed a matter of changing the economic model. But the
heart of this question is not that of the energy needed for subsistence: the true question concerns that energy of existence that is
libidinal energy.
By only posing the question of new ways of producing renewable subsistence energy such as those based on using hydrogen
technology as a storage medium, however, Rifkin would have us
believe that the energy crisis is temporary and that we will be able
to overcome it, and with it the third limit of capitalism, and that
all this will be possible without having to pose the question of
libidinal energy, without taking into account this second limit that
is in fact the truth of the third: the fact that the libido is being
destroyed, and that the drives it contained (like a Pandora’s box
holding within it every evil) now rule over beings devoid of
attention, and incapable of taking care of their world.
Libidinal energy is essentially renewable, except when it
decomposes into drive-based energy, which on the contrary
destroys its objects. The drives are indeed energy, but they are
essentially destructive, because the drive consumes its object
[consomme son objet], which means that it eats away at it
[qu’elle le consume]. This consumption [cette consumption et
cette consumation], implemented by consumers, is a destruction.
Consummare, which is the origin of the verb ‘to consume’, and
which initially meant to complete, to reach a goal, becomes
with Christianity a synonym of ‘to lose’, perdere, and to destroy,
destruere. Beginning in 1580, the French verb consommer meant
to use up food and energy. We begin to hear about ‘consumers’
from around 1745, and consommation then referred to the use
made of something in order to satisfy needs. Consumption
became a central economic term at the beginning of the twentieth century. And it was in 1972 that the word consumerism
appeared in the United States.
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41.
Energy of subsistence, energy of existence
and new savoir-vivre
If consumption destroys its object, libido is on the contrary what
takes care of its object. And this is why addressing the third limit
of capitalism does not imply abandoning fossil energy but rather
abandoning a drive-based economy and reconstituting libidinal
energy, which is a form of renewable energy – given that frequenting the objects of this energy causes it to increase. The third limit
of capitalism is not just a matter of the depletion of fossil fuel
reserves: it is the limit constituted by the drive to destroy all
objects in general through consumption, insofar as they have
become objects of the drives rather than objects of desire and
attention – the psychotechnological organization of consumption
destroys attention in all its forms, on the psychic plane as well as
the collective plane.
Rifkin, then, seems to completely ignore the second limit of
capitalism and the meaning it acquires when the third limit has
been reached, and for this reason his discourse seems to me to be
fraught with danger: he would have us believe that drive-based
growth could be sustained with the help of hydrogen technology.
Despite this, Rifkin’s account is interesting and important for
at least three reasons:
1. On the one hand, he proposes a real alternative to the problem
of subsistence energy, with his proposal for a hydrogen-based
system that would allow a harmful limit to be pushed back.
2. On the other hand, he posits that questions of energy are never
distinct from questions of communication and information
networks, that is, hypomnesic systems, retentional systems of
tertiary retentions.
3. Finally, and above all, he posits that the hydrogen network
must be based on the model of social networks made possible
by the World Wide Web and, thus, must surpass the opposition
between production and consumption.
Consumption-based organization, constituted by the opposition of production and consumption, is dangerous not only because
it produces excess carbon dioxide but because it destroys minds
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and spirits. The consequence of opposing production and consumption is that both producers and consumers are proletarianized by the loss of their knowledge: they are reduced to an economy
of subsistence, and deprived of any economy of their existence –
they are deprived of libidinal economy, that is, of desire. This is
why the fundamental question raised by the combination of the
three limits of capitalism is that of overcoming this opposition and
the proletarianization it structurally engenders.
What is extremely interesting is Rifkin’s proposition that energy
systems and information or mnemotechnical systems co-develop,
and that the most recent communication system, the Internet,
breaks, precisely, with the opposition between consumption and
production, and therefore constitutes the possibility of implementing a new distributed and decentralized network of renewable
energy in which everyone would be both producer and consumer
– by combining hydrogen storage technology with networks
based on the Internet model.
The application of this contributory model to the energy sector
results in what is referred to as ‘smart grids’. Various models of
such energy networks already exist: these are not yet based on
hydrogen storage, but they are characterized by an organization
of production that is decentralized and distributed throughout
the network.
Confronted with this unprecedented challenge facing globalized
humanity – a challenge of almost sublime dimensions, requiring
an extraordinary mobilization of the forces of mind and spirit to
meet it, a challenge convoking what Kant called the suprasensible,
which is also to say, the infinite (infinitely renewable) – the temptation of the industrial and capitalist world has been to offer a
technological and scientific response that denies the three limits
of capitalism. This temptation grounded in denial fails to
comprehend:
1. That these three limits, when they combine, produce a systemic
evolution at a higher level, that is, they cause something to
emerge.
2. That the industrial model must be changed not simply in order
to produce a new technical and scientific rationality, but to
constitute a new social rationality, producing motivation,
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motives for living together, that is, for taking care of the world
and those who live within it – producing a new savoir-vivre.
3. That the fundamental issue is here to reorient financial flows
towards long-term investment by waging war against speculation – but also against ways of life founded on the short term,
of which the most everyday example is the organization of
society through marketing, in a way that systematically
exploits the drives by destroying the libido as the capacity
for sustainable investment.
When consumption becomes drive-based, society is profoundly
endangered. If there were no limit to this consumption, and if
fossil energy was inexhaustible, the catastrophe would perhaps be
even greater than the one resulting from the depletion of fossil
fuels. Perhaps this depletion is in the end a kind of chance: the
opportunity to understand that the true question of energy lies
elsewhere, that subsistence energy is only useful to the extent that
it contributes to an energy of existence – and does so through its
capacity to project the plane of consistences. Such are the true
stakes involved in what is referred to today, somewhat questionably, as ‘ascending innovation’.
42. Political technologies and the
transindividuation of disputes
Over the last ten years, society as a whole (in industrialized countries and industrializing countries) – thanks to a spectacular drop
in the costs of the electronic technologies used to fabricate materials, and in the costs of data transactions and copying – has
acquired new practical competencies, but also analytical and
reflexive competencies, through the growth of digital apparatus
that grants access to functionalities hitherto reserved for professionals, and hitherto organized according to an industrial division of labour (and everything that comes with it, such as, for
example, intellectual property laws).
This socialization of innovation more and more frequently
engages social forms of apprenticeship that seem to be selforganizing and to elude the more usual process of socializing
innovation referred to as ‘descending’ (steered by the research/
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95
development/marketing complex): instead we find what is referred
to as ‘ascending’ innovation. Ascending innovation is a structural
break with that organization of social relations in the industrial
world that operates according to the opposing couple, ‘production/consumption’.
Pour en finir avec la mécroissance tried to show that the opposition between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ transindividuation processes is an illusion, that is, an unsustainable state of affairs – but
a state of affairs that is, however, exploited by marketing and the
culture industries, which appropriate collaborative media by using
‘buzz’ and other control and fabrication techniques deriving from
what Bernays named ‘public relations’, an exploitation that
establishes pseudo-contributive situations.
This work also related the individual practices and new social
movements emerging from digital networks to attempts to take
care of the self and others, and to those techniques of the self that
were the epimeleai, skhole and otium of the Ancients, all of which
were also techniques of governmentality.
Rather than opposing the ‘bottom-up’ to the ‘top-down’, it is
a matter of constituting systems for producing metadata9 that
organize and create political technologies encouraging the emergence of psychic and collective individuation processes of a new
kind. These systems must be grounded in the representation of
differing perspectives, polemics and controversies, as well as convergences of interest or perspective enabling re-groupings, that is,
ultimately, transindividuations that recognize themselves in
meanings, thereby constituting collective individuations, and
establishing, at the heart of digitalized public life, argued and
analysable critique that counters the murmurings that abound
in a falsely consensual digital world lacking instruments for
enhancing collective singularities.
Digital technologies form a new technological milieu that is
reticulated and relational, related to what Simondon called an
‘associated techno-geographic milieu’. These technologies reconfigure what Simondon called the process of psychic and collective
individuation, and transform into technologies of the spirit what
have hitherto functioned essentially as technologies of control.
In this technological milieu, electronic apparatus has been connected into a system, via the network that formed thanks to the
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IP protocol. The resulting dynamic system is in constant evolution
and is grounded in a relational economy of miniaturized and personalized equipment and relational services – referred to, notably
by Jeremy Rifkin, as relational technologies (or ‘R technologies’).
This system brings with it new social dynamics, completely unprecedented when compared with the characteristics of industrial
society, dynamics propelled by both: (1) a psychosocial state of
the population no longer content with the consumerist organizational model, which therefore acquires a dynamic potential in the
form of expectations; and (2) the combination of the effects of
Moore’s ‘law’ and the specificities of IP networks.
But there are a great number of powerful counter-forces opposing these social dynamics, diverting them, turning them against
themselves, and models have arisen that could thus be called
hyper-consumerist and hyper-consensual, through which consumers self-prescribe their situation, as shown in the work of MarieAnne Dujarier.10
43.
Taking care – a new libidinal economy
for a new way of life
The characteristics proper to the new technological milieu that
forms along with this technological protocol of reticulation, which
has structural consequences for social reticulation, amount to the
fact that it is bi-directional and to the fact that it inherently produces and collects a metalanguage of a new kind, through which
metadata is formalized, collected and organized: it is the combination of these characteristics that makes possible the constitution
of so-called ‘social networks’. And the latter are to a large extent
the instruments through which pre-digital social relations are
being destroyed.
But, if this is the case, it is thanks to true negligence and carelessness on the part of European, national and local public authorities. These reticular technologies are in fact also regional and
territorial, and enable local policies to be devised that enhance the
relational capacities of a region – and the capabilities that this
makes possible, in Amartya Sen’s sense of this term. The formation
of new psychic and collective individuation processes is the development of individual and collective capacities, and we now know
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how a renewal of economic and political life is conditioned by the
reconstitution of such capacities – that is, through the implementation of a genuine de-proletarianization that must be placed on the
agenda of national political battles, and through a ‘politics of care’
that does not reduce care to a question of ‘ethics’, on the contrary
putting it at the heart of a new age of political economy.
The new metalanguage that metadata forms constitutes a new
epoch of the grammatization process that globally trans-forms the
conditions of transindividuation. A psychic process is translated
at the level of a collective individuation through which psychic
individuation is marked, inscribed so to speak in the real, and is
recognized by other psychic individuals: this work of collective
individuation by psychic individuation, and conversely this
inscription of collective individuation in psychic individuation, is
the process of transindividuation. Now it is precisely this circuit
formed by the process of individuation that can be seen in ‘social
networks’ – however poor they may seem at first sight, just a few
years after their appearance.
This is why the dynamic brought about by the reticular IP protocol must be described as the effect of a psychic, collective and
technical individuation process of a completely new type. The
Simondonian theory of psychosocial individuation is a theory of
relations in which this individuation is produced via the transindividuation process as the formation of circuits that incarnate and
activate these relations, and through which the process of coindividuation can be metastabilized.
However poor socio-digital networks mostly seem to be, they
now bring together, at lightning speed, hundreds of millions of
psychic individuals in a collective individuation process. Political
leadership in relation to this fact then becomes an overriding
imperative – that is, from the beginning, and over-determining all
other imperatives. Taking care of the collective, which is the only
worthwhile definition of genuine political action, clearly forms
part of this – and in particular taking care of the younger generations, through which future collective forms may be invented,
but also through which they may collapse.
I, along with Ars Industrialis, have argued in previous works
that the great contemporary techno-industrial alternative is the
reconstitution of associated milieus, and the struggle against the
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dissociation of social milieus induced by generalized proletarianization. Associated milieus are relational (and dialogical)11
strengths, whereas dissociation consists in short-circuiting and
bypassing those relations required for the establishing of transindividuation circuits. Such relations are the condition of formation of trust and fidelity without which no society and no economic
system is sustainable.
This context should spur the European Union to elaborate a
new industrial model, based on an industrial politics of technologies of spirit – that is, of sublimation – as the only sustainable
libidinal economy, and with the goal of producing libidinal energy.
It is only on this condition that Rifkin’s proposal would be capable
of supplying a basis for subsistence (and a basis for biopolitics
conceived at the level of the biosphere) within a new politics of
existence: a noopolitics that inverts the fatal logic of psychopower.
The genuine question, for Europe as for the rest of the world, is
whether it can invent – in dialogue with America and the new
major industrialized nations – a new way of life where economizing means taking care.12
Part IV
Pharmacology of the Question
6
The Time of the Question
Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the
direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’
44.
Transindividuation as adoption and the time
of the question
The adoption of a technique or technology by a society, and by
an epoch of that society, is a phase in a process of collective individuation, which occurs between psychic individuals, and through
the mediation of this technique or technology, that is, as individuation that is collective as much as it is psychic, thereby metastabilizing a stage of a transindividuation process. And these are
also the conditions of the individuation of the technical system
itself, which transforms and metastabilizes itself through this
adoption.
This process is the adoption of a default, that is, of what any
pharmakon necessarily induces, namely, the displacement of fault
(and of the infinite) that we here designate, after reading Freud
and Lacan, das Ding. A transindividuation process is above all a
process of adoption. Nevertheless, as a result of successive stages
of grammatization that have made possible the industrialization
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of production, then of consumption, the transindividuation process
as process of adoption has been short-circuited and replaced by a
process of adaptation.
This adaptive transindividuation process is formed through
short-circuits – whereas adoptive transindividuation forms long
circuits. Short-circuits can only result in accidents: they are incapable of generating the necessary, that which is needed (desire and
sublimation), from the default (das Ding); they are incapable of
generating the feeling and the conviction that the default can and
must become that which is necessary.
This adaptive process was first of all imposed on those who, as
‘producers’, were dedicated to trans-forming material: this was the
proletarianization that dominated industry in the nineteenth
century. Then, in the twentieth century, as all behaviour in every
aspect of everyday life came to be controlled, adaptive shortcircuits were extended through the proletarianization of the consumer. And finally, as forms of knowledge deriving from noetic
life are introduced into computer systems, it is those who work
with the mind or spirit who find themselves having to adapt their
intellectual activity to the prostheses of cognitive capitalism, their
nervous systems setting the parameters of instrumental processes
while nevertheless witnessing the reduction and eventually the
disappearance of their own noetic activity.
They find their noetic activity depleted because cognitive technologies, developed exclusively in order to increase performance,
that is, the speed with which information is handled, are shortcircuiting and bypassing their capacity to critique the retentional
systems in which these computer systems consist: the time of
reflection, which is the time of the question, has finally been
removed. Having been workers of the spirit, they now find themselves becoming employees of ‘cognitive capitalism’: no longer
workers of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, but rather employees of a
capitalism that has, precisely, lost its spirit, that is, its mind.1
45.
The possibility of posing questions in the epoch
of transformational technologies
The consumerist model only truly developed in Western Europe
after the Second World War, and it was not fully globalized until
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the end of the twentieth century. As for the proletarianization of
noetic life that took place over the last three decades, it is the
result of a combination of various factors. The two main factors
have been: on the one hand, the introduction of digital pharmacology, particularly the fact that the speed of operation has led to
short-circuits in the political2 and noetic3 spheres; and, on the
other hand, the ‘conservative revolution’ that replaced public
authorities with marketing as the means of determining the
conditions of adjustment.4
It was shown in ‘Pharmacology of Capital and the Economy of
Contribution’5 that until the late 1960s the industrial individuation process that led to the systemic disadjustments typical of
modern society had been regulated, as the relationship between
the technical system and the other social systems – and beyond,
or beneath (the psychic systems, biological systems and geographic
systems) – by the mediation of public authorities, that is, a political sphere that still constituted a deliberative forum in relation to
the technological fate of human societies. This remained the case
until the American and British ‘conservative revolution’, which
organized, at a global level, and via financialization, the systematic
short-circuiting of politics itself.
As we saw in Chapter 3, the short-circuiting of politics was
legitimated by a technological situation such that, ‘things being
what they are’ in the financial sphere, for example, or, in the
nuclear sphere, speed – as the performance of information technologies, of missiles, of trading software, or as the effect of the
mass media and electronic networks on public opinion and so on,
and finally, the overwhelming acceleration of innovation tied to
digital technologies and brought about by the exploitation of the
micro-electronic potential of matter, and especially silicon – was
posited as clear evidence that political time, that is, deliberative
time, now finds itself to be de facto obsolete, marketing having
taken charge of the adjustments between systems, and having
done so by following an adaptive path.
In this way, the short-circuiting of long processes of transindividuation was legitimated – that is, the short-circuiting of adoption. And this situation has led to a short-termism that we are
now learning, in a general way, establishes an economy of
carelessness and a feeling of general mistrust.
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This immense demoralization, expressed in tones that are more
apocalyptic every day, is occurring at the same time that, through
biotechnology and nanotechnology (which can together be referred
to as transformational technologies), a very great bifurcation is
taking place in the trajectory of pharmacological being.
Transformational technologies seem in fact to constitute a
mutation of technics itself and, according to the thesis supported
by several currents of thought that may be referred to together
under the general category of ‘post-humanism’, this amounts to
the closure of the history of man – the question of the relation
between the technical system, the other social systems and the
different organological dimensions, biological systems and including geophysical systems (given that the materials transformed by
technical and economic activity are supplied by the geophysical
system) being posed here in completely singular and extreme
terms.
It is in the context of this demoralization and resulting general
mistrust that hyper-disadjustment occurs, such that, in the organological transformation process, the level of artificial organa forming
the technical system seems able to replace the other levels: both
the level of psychosomatic organs and apparatus, including
the genital organs,6 and the level of organizations and social
organisms.7
Nevertheless, I do not myself believe that the term ‘posthumanism’ accurately describes the specificity of the pharmacological turn that transformational technologies obviously
constitute. If what must be understood here is the becoming of a
life-form that constantly composes with its pharmacological
becoming, then to propose that we are entering into a posthumanist age presupposes that we are exiting from an age that
can be satisfactorily described by its humanity – and that we know
what we are talking about when we use this word.
Nothing is less certain. If we can recognize ourselves as forming
a we, that is, a unity, within which we are capable of agreement,
it is of course true that we only ‘are’ in being constantly and
always challenged and placed into question by the mediation of
that which, traversing those to whom we give the name ‘humans’,
constitutes their default as well as their excess.
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105
What is called ‘man’ is apprehended by Heidegger, at the beginning of Being and Time, as Dasein. And to this being-there, which
is also to say, to this ex-sistence, he accords a privilege that is
beyond the reach of all other beings. This privilege is that of
posing questions: ‘This being which we ourselves in each case are
and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being we
formulate terminologically as Da-sein.’8 I devoted my early works
to questioning the way that Heidegger’s initial path – of which
Being and Time was the magisterial peak, but which he abandoned at the end of the 1920s – denies and rejects the pharmacological situation, and in particular the role of tertiary retention in
the constitution of the already-there, as well as in its modes of
access, that is, in that which, as past, has always already preceded
Dasein. Despite this, I argue that the question of the question that
Heidegger poses in §2 as definitional for Dasein, and as definitive
for any entry into the question of ‘the being that we ourselves are’,
is the only path worthy of question.
At the same time, I suggest that this collective self-designation,
as the beings that we ourselves are, must constitute – but at the
cost of transformations that will become clearer in what follows
– the point of departure for philosophy, if it is to avoid rushing
into a humanism that was the sign, in the eyes of Socrates, of the
Sophistic evasion of the question of being (that is, for Socrates,
the question, which always begins thus: ‘ti esti?’) by taking man
as the measure of all things.
Leaving Heideggerian thought to one side, I propose that the
question of the question is that of who, in posing questions,
creates long circuits and through that adopts that which constantly places into question, namely, the pharmakon. It is in this
‘placing into question’ that psychic individuals individuate themselves while being inscribed into a regime of collective individuation where technical individuation operates constantly, and
through that so does das Ding, as the default that is necessary
[défaut qu’il faut]: as object of desire.
Adaptation, as a regime of transindividuation that produces
short-circuits, is what, insofar as it makes adoption impossible,
short-circuits and prevents the possibility of posing questions.
Such are the current stakes of the development of industrial
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Pharmacology of the Question
technologies of which transformational technologies are the
newest stage.
The first question is not here that of the advent of a posthumanist age of technics, which autonomizes itself like the grey
goo popularized by Eric Drexler,9 but the completion of a total
proletarianization implemented according to a purely economic
logic that destroys the political sphere, that is, the individuation
processes that alone can bring about the adoption of technics, and
precisely through the encounter with proletarianization – which
is here the accomplishment of the first moment of the pharmakon10 as a short-circuit in transindividuation.
46. The question of the impossibility of posing
questions and placing into question before das
unheimlich Ding
To question is to think for oneself, that is, to accede to the anamnesic dimension of individuation. Here lies the ‘possibility of
posing questions’. And this is the first question, that is, that to
which those questions that arise for us today are submitted.
Such is the question of the question.11
If the question of post-humanism does seem to arise, however,
this is because the question of the question, contrary to what the
‘analytic of Dasein’ proposes as ontology (and as the question of
ontological difference),12 is itself pre-ceded by the pharmacological
situation of the ‘possibility of posing questions’, by the pharmacological situation as placing in question.
Indeed, the question has today shown itself to be primordially
pharmacological, and the pharmacological situation seems to be
the origin of all questions, as the question of the default of origin,
and as the question in default of the origin: as a placing in
question by the default of origin.
If we are placed above all in the situation that Heidegger assigns
to these ‘beings that we ourselves are’ – namely, noetic beings
who begin with the possibility of the question, this possibility
constituting the noetic itself, that is, us, insofar as we will never
cease to question in all circumstances – then it is necessary to ask,
at once:
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• in what lies this very possibility of questioning in all circumstances; and
• whether the current circumstances that lead some to speak of
post-humanism do not above all lie in the imminence of a new
situation in this respect, a situation containing the unprecedented risk of closing the very possibility of the question.
Perhaps we are in fact confronted, here and now, in this situation sometimes referred to as ‘post-human’, with what may disrupt
or interrupt the very possibility of questioning – which obviously
does not mean that it is necessary to refer this ‘being that we
ourselves are’ back to the human, nor relate this disruption to
‘post-humanity’. To do so would be to miss the entire question: it
would be, indeed, to already cede the closure of the possibility
of questioning.
However things may stand in relation to this disruption of the
very possibility of questioning, for Heidegger the question posed
by Dasein is the question of being. I would like to attempt to
preserve this position and this proposition, which characterizes
Dasein by its possibility of questioning by originarily referring the
possibility of questioning of ‘the being that we ourselves are’ to
the possibility of being placed in question precisely in its very
possibility of questioning – and of being through becoming such
that it expects to be trans-formed into a future: such that it expects
to be individuated and transindividuated through adoption, that
is, to be infinitized.
The being that we ourselves are would be placed into question
by an impossibility of questioning due to the initial quivering of
every question insofar as it genuinely questions – and that as such
puts the being that we ourselves are in contradiction with itself,
by itself, that is, by and with the other of itself, by and as the very
other out of myself that it becomes [devenir], and sometimes
comes to be [advenir], before what must be called the Thing:
das Ding.
To specify this more precisely, let us say that questioning would
be questioned by the heteros that would constitute the hidden face
of its autos as its pharmakon, that is, as that which, pro-jecting
outside of itself, ahead of itself, thereby exteriorizing it, may open
the path of its becoming [devenir], but may also, at the same time
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Pharmacology of the Question
and in the same stroke, bar access to its future [avenir] – its
becoming may always dissolve its future.
The placing into question of the possibility of questioning
would be the condition of any genuine question. This placing into
question begins with the possibility, for the questioned that could
become the questioning, of being pro-jected into becoming by that
which puts into question through the threat of the impossibility
of questioning, its pros-thetic pro-jection pre-ceding its possibility
of posing questions, as a kind of in-organic drive, that is, as an
essentially automatic situation,13 and as a placing into question by
an Unheimlichkeit.
Dasein, if this is what we want to keep calling the being that
we ourselves would be, is challenged or called into question by
the pharmacological situation in which consists its original beingin-default [être-en-défaut], that is, its default of origin [défaut
d’origine]: being-there is questioned and questioning only insofar
as it is prosthetic, and because it is prosthetic. It is its very prostheticity that projects and places into question from its very origin,
as default of origin: as not-yet-being-there, but elsewhere, outside
itself, that is, far from it, such that it remains always to come.
Given that all prostheticity is pharmacological and that every
pharmakon is prosthetic (that is, automatic and unheimlich), the
singularity of the situation that some try to describe as ‘posthuman’ would not derive from any ‘technicization’ of the being
that we ourselves are and will become in questioning – that is, in
infinitizing, through adoption, adaptive finitization – since this
aforementioned ‘questioning-ness’ [questionnance] would always
have been techno-logically and therefore pharmaco-logically given.
It would derive on the contrary from a new pharmacological
dimension, before which or in which every traditional way of
questioning would be not only challenged but literally swept away.
47.
Sin, the scapegoat and the question of God
Prostheticity is this default of origin that almost three thousand
years ago took the contradictory name of original sin, and moreover also resulted in the ‘uncertain origin’ of Moses.14 Prostheticity
is the default of origin such that it opens the question of the fault
of the challenged-being or being-called-into-question [être-mis-en-
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109
question], including as the stuttering of Moses, as his faulty pronunciation, or as that of the Ephraimites, as babelization, the
idiomaticity of all languages, and so on. The question of the fault
of this being-called-into-question is then older than the question
of its being: it is older than the questioning of its being, of its
being-in-question, both as the possibility and impossibility of such
a question, opening it as the threat and in the threat of its closure
(and older than what Heidegger referred to as both the forgetting
of being and a-letheia).
It must be asked here what and how Moses, for example, questions and is called into question. It must be asked what and how
the call of Israel and the voice of God, for example, are responses
to, and of, the question. That would require, precisely, passing
through the question of the default of origin that lies hidden
beneath original sin, in which it can already be seen that ‘challenging’ or ‘calling into question’, which in this case would be
divine, and which would also be a matter of the pharmakos, that
is, of the scapegoat, precedes every question.
That there is always a scapegoat on the horizon of any pharmacological situation, and thus of every possibility of questioning
and being called into question, is that of which religious fanaticism
and all other less visible forms of fundamentalism are effects. And
on this register, secular fundamentalism is no less vulgar than what
it believes itself to be fighting: to make religion the scapegoat for
every evil is to avoid confronting the harsh reality of the contemporary pharmakon denied collectively by fundamentalisms and
fanaticisms of every kind, religious as well as secular.15
48. The pharmacological challenge as the suspension
of the ‘understanding that Dasein has of its being’
The situation must be called pharmacological precisely in that
prostheticity, in the course of that process of exteriorization that
is hominization – and as incessant compensation for the default
of origin through prostheses that constantly revive and deepen this
fault – is at once that which, at such and such a stage in this
process of exteriorization, interrupts an established possibility
of questioning (what Heidegger called an ‘understanding that
Dasein has of its being’), and that which, calling questioning into
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Pharmacology of the Question
question, challenging questioning, thereby revives it in and through
another possibility of questioning.
The situation must be called pharmacological in that, at the
same time:
• the prostheticity of questioning is poisonous, that is, bars access
to the question, not only to itself, but to itself-the-other, to its
becoming itself, to its individuation through the other, that is,
through das Ding – but more than with Heidegger, I am here
speaking with Freud, Lacan and Winnicott;
• this prostheticity is the remedy for this poisonousness itself,
in fact the only remedy, and thus becomes the very pathway
granting access to this same-other [autre-même], insofar as
the being that ‘we’ are become ourselves [nous-mêmes] (or as
one sometimes says in French, ‘nous-autres’), through being
called into question, becoming a questioning being, that is, a
questioning becoming, that is, ultimately, a questioning event
[un advenant questionnant]: the advening of the question, individuating, through that, becoming-as-future – transforming,
sublimating.
49.
Again political economy
Such a way of posing the question of the question questions the
possibility and the impossibility of a pharmacology of the question
– and of that which, in a question, in a true question, refers not
only to astonishment, to thaumazein, but to the strange and the
disturbing: there is a calling into question through Unheimlichkeit
– which is pharmacological just as the pharmacological is
unheimlich.
If what calls us into question can also close us off from the
question, that is, take us away from every question, turn us thereby
into those for whom there no longer are any questions – and thus
into those about whom there are no questions – then this does
indeed concern a pharmacological question: a poisonous (calling
into) question, that is, self-intoxicating, self-destructive, and which
I believe can only and must only be called pharmaco-logical,
because it can and must nonetheless open the one who is
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111
questioned, who is called-into-question, to the at once heimlich
and unheimlich possibility of a question in return, let’s say of a
Rückfrage.
It must open the questioned to the possibility that the question
has a curative or therapeutic capacity, that is, to the possibility of
a calling into question that takes the question back to its radicality
as a question. So I believe, just as Deleuze declared that one must
‘believe in this world’, and just as Nietzsche affirmed the coming
of a ‘new belief’.
Challenged and called into question by a becoming that is ours
(heimlich), and that nevertheless escapes us (unheimlich), challenged by that which pre-cedes ‘us’ and doubles or redoubles us
in each and every way, our being-there may become a no-longerbeing-there [n’être-plus-là].
This no-longer-being-there proceeds primordially from a pharmaco-logical situation in which we become what we are only
because we are constantly called into question. But in this time,
faced with this new pharmacology that leads some to speak of
post-humanism, faced with this new system and this new
pharmaco-logical milieu, we may find ourselves more than ever
before projected before and into the becoming of a no-longerbeing-there without future: not there ever again [plus jamais là]
– nevermore.
In the imminence of hyper-interruption, of hyper-epokhality, the
current pharmacological becoming bars, or may bar, the possibility of trans-forming this becoming into a future.
Now what is it, fundamentally, that is here being called into
question? It is ignorance of the pharmaco-logical situation as such.
And it is, more precisely, a pharmacology that can only be questioning and questioned, as a pharmacology of the question, insofar
as it is apprehended as a political economy.
For in this short-circuiting of every question, where access to
the question is barred in principle, and through the fact of
this hyper-interruption, through the fact of this epokhal
hyper-redoubling, through the double as such, and as always
through the unheimlich,16 the question arises of an archiproletarianization of the not-yet-being-there becoming, therefore,
a no-longer-being-there.
112
50.
Pharmacology of the Question
Not yet there. The height of fault and the two
times of the question
This situation of not-yet-being-there was stated by Jean Jaurès in
the editorial in the first issue of L’Humanité, on 18 April 1904 –
on which Jacques Derrida commented on 4 March 1999, in the
very same newspaper, a newspaper that after the 1920 Tours
Congress became the central organ of the French Communist
Party: ‘Humanity does not exist at all yet or it barely exists.’17
If we take this statement seriously, and if we presume that
humanity has not begun to exist at some point since 1904, then
the question of post-humanism would be completely premature,
above all in that it would not yet know how to think the question
of prematurity, that is, the question of the pharmaco-logy of exteriorization, the question of a kind of inexistence of man, an
incompleteness of man, of man’s relation to the incomplete
[inachevé], that is, to (de)fault, which will have always called the
human into question, and doubly so since it is pharmacological,
but which, perhaps, here and now, could be completed or destroyed
[achever] (as one says of an injured horse that it had to be
destroyed): could fill in (or make up for) the fault (or defect).
This incompleteness is at once Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological
question, thought as a process of exteriorization, and the philosophical question of individuation as developed by Simondon. To
begin by proposing that there would have been a humanity, threatened by who knows what ‘post’ – ‘post-humanism’ necessarily
coming after a banal ‘humanism’ through which, however, one
dispenses with having to pose the question and allows oneself in
advance not to put anything into question – is to close off, from
the outset, what such thoughts put into question, and the still
unrealized possibilities of questioning that they conceal from the
perspective of a new critique of political economy.
For the real question is not post-humanism but
hyper-proletarianization.
What questions can there be, in general, after a pharmacological calling into question? Here the question of the doubly epokhal
redoubling arises – here, that is, in the face of that which calls us
into question under the premature name of a still immature question, that of ‘post-humanism’. This immaturity and its specific
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prematurity would be the effects of an epokhal redoubling of an
undoubtedly unprecedented scope, constituting a boundless and
excessive calling into question of this humanity that ‘does not exist
at all yet or barely exists’.
We must therefore re-examine this redoubled doubling insofar
as it is made up of two moments that present themselves in the
end as, on the one hand, that of the challenge or the calling into
question, and, on the other hand, that of the question itself – the
challenge being the time of finitization as adaptation, and the
question being the time of adoption as infinitization: as sublimation before das Ding.
51. Selection criteria and the
process of internalization
The primordial prostheticity of the event that we ourselves become,
as I attempted to establish in the first volume of Technics and
Time, is a pharmacological situation that incites a primordial
melancholy and hypochondria, of which the devoured liver of
Prometheus in chains is the emblem, and this pharmacological
situation is the matrix of desire.18 Never, undoubtedly, has this
sorrow [peine] – the sorrow and punishment of those who hardly
[à peine] exist, and who, after the blow from Zeus that punished
both Prometheus and mortals,19 were sentenced and condemned
to toil and hard labour [à la peine, c’est-à-dire, condamnés au
travail], to ponos, as Jaurès knew better than anyone – never has
this sorrow been so deep and so threatening, never has it been so
toxic, that is, disarming.
The living being that we are, and that we are still becoming,
we who would also be animals – a living being that we are and
become through what Leroi-Gourhan called the process of exteriorization and hominization – this living being thus becomes
heteronomous in relation to its own technicity, a heteronomy that
means that what is ‘proper’ to it is also and above all its impropriety, that is, its being-in-default, its default of origin.
This prosthetic, heteronomous living being is constantly and
has forever been challenged and called into question by a technicity that is itself perpetually new. From the moment of its default
of origin, this being has continued to develop ways of
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Pharmacology of the Question
compensating for the perverse, secondary effects of its primordial
technicity. These effects are always already there before it, an
inorganic, heimlich and unheimlich being-there that has always
already preceded this as its past – as that past of which §6 of Sein
und Zeit states that it has ‘always already preceded’ Dasein, that
is, ‘us’, those who advene [les advenants].
We, those who advene, have forever been called into question
by our technicity or our prostheticity, above all because this technicity, each time new, destroys the arrangements established by
the pharmacological becoming of the heteronomous living being
that we are constantly becoming, through the invention of configurations that are each time original, and as such epokhal, where
the heteronomous living being arranges its psychosomatic equipment and social organizations in relation to the technical system
that constitutes its milieu, so as to become autonomous relative
to its pharmakon: in essential relation to this pharmakon, by
adopting it, and by relatively (but never completely) autonomizing
itself in relation to its toxic effects.
These epochs emerge from a genealogy that necessitates a
general organology, in the context of the occurrence of a process
of grammatization. And we must here return to the doubly epokhal
redoubling and to its two moments, that is, to the pharmacological
character of prostheticity such as it is always concretely expressed
by passing through the two moments of the pharmakon:
• That through which the appearance of a new pharmakon in the
technical system modifies this system and thereby suspends
‘the understanding that being-there has of its being’, that is, the
circuits of transindividuation that this system had established
between the psychosomatic level and the social level of individuation. Let us call this moment the pharmacological challenge, the calling into question of those we have become, where
the suspension of circuits of transindividuation, that is, their
short-circuit, is what always short-circuits every possibility of
questioning: this interruption, this suspension, is always a kind
of tetany, a kind of para-lysis, an impossibility of analysis,
critique, thought, in short, an impossibility of questioning. It is
always a poisonous moment, more or less perilous, an inevitable factor in every kind of pain and sorrow.
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115
• That moment through which a new retentional system – for the
pharmakon, being epiphylogenetic, always constitutes a tertiary
retention on the basis of which a retentional system is constituted that each time introduces new selection criteria – enables
the trans-formation of this hypomnesis, in which Plato located
the entire toxicity of the pharmakon, into an anamesis. Thus,
for instance, the geometrical intuition that according to Husserl’s
late work is grounded in a pharmacology that would be not
only ‘scriptural’ but more generally technical, in this case in the
form of techniques of polishing and surveying. All this is well
known thanks to Derrida’s commentary. But it is, perhaps, too
well known.
It is only through such a pharmacological inversion, which
constitutes the second step of the doubly epokhal redoubling as a
therapeutic moment of melete, of epimeleai, of skhole, otium and
so on, that new knowledge occurs, which is also to say, a new
experience and a new work of the question, a new knowledge of
questioning: a knowledge that knows how to pose and adopt new
questions (to create new long circuits) through making an effort
[en étant à la peine], questions that would be worthwhile
[en valent la peine].
It is also this toil, this effort and this sorrow [peine] of which
Kant speaks when, in ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority
in Philosophy’,20 he reproaches those whom he accuses of mystagogy of ignoring this inevitable toil and sorrow. Derrida’s failure
to raise this question of peine in his commentary on this text21
amounted to an avoidance of the question of the work of the spirit,
along with that of work in general, and of that work that is spirit.
It was, in other words, a way of avoiding the question of the proletarianization of the spirit and of those workers of the spirit.
All this is of course only valid within what I have described by
repeating what was there in Derrida, who himself was repeating
Leroi-Gourhan, in relation to the consequences of the process of
exteriorization, that is, of the spatialization of time, of différance
and grammatization, of the production of tertiary retentions of
which the process of grammatization is a specific, belated mode,
which gives birth to the West, that is, to what Heidegger believed
must be understood as the ‘question of being’.
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Pharmacology of the Question
Now, the new pharmacological moment brought about by
transformational technologies is on this score no doubt quite
unprecedented: it may indeed represent a challenge to a pharmacological framework that is several million years old, if it is true
that what is occurring is no longer a process of prosthetic exteriorization so much as a process of prosthetic internalization.
52. Processes of internalization and the
industrialization of the pharmakon
Internalization has always existed, as the internalization of an
exteriority not pre-ceded by any interiority, and therefore not
simply an exteriority. This must be thought with Winnicott as
transitional space or potential space, neither inside nor outside,
an object relation at once founded on and foundering with das
Ding as default of origin (rather than as ‘lack’). It is on the basis
of this space that would neither be inside nor outside that
internalization will have been possible.22
Nevertheless, internalization itself is today being prostheticized,
industrialized and economized according to industrial conditions,
occurring within what must be understood as a libidinal ecology.
What ought we think, that is, question, in relation to this unprecedented and blinding situation? What is called into question by
this prosthetic internalization?
In the preceding chapters, I have tried above all to develop the
question of internalization in general and in its numerous modalities, among which what I refer to as proletarianization is the
short-circuited mode, the adaptationist, disindividuating mode. I
have opposed to the proletarianizing tendency of the pharmakon
in general, insofar as it constitutes a factor of heteronomy, the
analysis of transindividuation in terms of the adoption of the
(de)fault – through which it becomes that which is necessary, that
is, that which overcomes the opposition between heteronomy and
autonomy.
The process of ‘internalization’ that in some way comes to
invert the process of ‘exteriorization’ (these terms should be placed
within quotes, which also means that das Ding is on this side of
this opposition since what is exteriorized was never preceded by
something that would have been ‘in the interior’) constitutes the
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117
true challenge and at the same time the true question: that of a
new possibility and a new necessity of questioning in and as the
default that is necessary [le défaut qu’il faut] – that is, finally, a
new way of adopting.
For what is it to adopt, if not above all to let oneself be
challenged, and to individuate oneself in this challenge, in
this being called into question? To individuate oneself: that is,
to think, to create new circuits of transindividuation that can be
long only because they are, precisely, open to question – to the
infinite.
Confronted with transformational technologies, this challenge
nevertheless creates a pharmacological situation of absolute
urgency. In this urgent situation, all criteria-production systems
– which were always, in the end, organological arrangements of
layer upon layer of criteriology, that is, screens that sift and govern
the selection process – find themselves challenged, called into
question, simultaneously and systemically.
Biotechnologies in their totality enable the trans-formation of
those selection criteria of which classical biology was the descriptive study, of which agriculture was a prescriptive practice, and of
which biotechnologies are a total upheaval.
At the same time, gaining access to matter at the nanometric
level has brought to light its hypermaterial character23 and radically trans-formed atomic selection criteria, whereas previously
the manipulation of physical matter had been limited to processes
of chemical combination. The borders between these fields of
selection are now themselves being challenged and called into
question, and criteriologies are finding themselves thrown into
upheaval thanks to this very fact.
It is even more difficult to identify the right questions that bear,
and bring about, this enormous challenge that here combines with
primordial melancholy – challenges are always pharmacologically
reactive, and always make us reactive in the Nietzschean-Deleuzian
sense – and combines as well with economico-political interests
that want at all costs to avoid the question, either by denying the
challenge, or by sensationalizing it in order to create a smokescreen, diverting attention from what is genuinely being called into
question, from which alone a true question can arise, and as a
completely new question.
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Post-humanism is such a smokescreen, and it forms a system
with this misalliance.
This has led to the paralysis of thinking, and has prevented it
from questioning and caused it to give up on itself, that is, on the
possibility that what does not yet exist, or barely exists, or hardly
exists, may still come to be, by transforming its defect – the other
coming from [pro-venant] das Ding – into that which is necessary
[ce qu’il faut]. It is here more necessary than ever to pass through
Canguilhem, and through his thought of normativity, confronted
by the fundamentally pathogenetic character of the non-inhumanbeing that we sometimes are – precisely when we are normative
insofar as we have the power and are struck by the temptation to
‘fall sick’, and where most of the time we are inhuman-beings
[êtrinhumain].24
In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations,25 I tried to show
the degree to which Foucault neglected these questions and the
pharmacology they require: his archaeology of modern medicine
has nothing to say about pharmacopoeia in general, still less
about the industrialization of pharmacy. But I must again insist
that it is only from out of the interior of the industrialization of
the pharmakon in general, and of the pharmaceutical sector and
health in particular, that the ‘post-human’ can arise as this false
question and this new form of deception, a new trap, preventing
questioning, that is, preventing us from taking the measure of
what is played out in the industrialization of the pharmakon.
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53.
The new scapegoats
We have seen that, generally, a new pharmacological event
produces a primary suspension that disorients psychosocial
individuation by short-circuiting long-established organological
programmes, which are thus suspended by this techno-logical
epokhe. What Being and Time called ‘the understanding that
being-there has of its being’ is thus challenged by the pharmakon,
and as a techno-logical epokhe caused by technical individuation,
that is, by what Heidegger himself described as a system of
references.1
The programmatologies through which physiological, technical
and social programmes are arranged together, programmes that
are established and implemented by physiological, technical and
social systems of organs and organizations, constitute a complex
and multi-dimensional organological milieu. This milieu is woven
by transductive relations knitted together on all three organological levels through the play of the tendencies and countertendencies they harbour. And they thus metastabilize, through a
horizon of meaning, that ‘understanding that being-there has of its
being’ that constitutes what Simondon named the transindividual.
The advent of a new pharmacological (which is also to say,
retentional) order suspends these established programmatologies,
and the relations that concretize transindividuality – and we have
seen that, as such, it constitutes a pathology, which we can
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understand as a kind of lesion. The second redoubling, the secondary epokhe, constitutes a new epoch strictly speaking, when the
adoption of the pharmakon finally generates a therapeutic. This
is the process of adoption2 insofar as it forms a new ‘understanding by being-there of its being’. Such an understanding is the
process of transindividuation through which an epoch unfolds,
that is, through which individuation develops at every level into
a new pharmacological (which is also to say, retentional) order.
This transindividuation process reconstitutes long circuits on
the ruins of those short-circuited, that is, suspended, by the first
pharmacological moment, and thereby opposes adaptive models
to processes of adoption. What results is not only an understanding: it is an affection, a new pathos, a philia, in short, a libidinal
economy, which begins through a dis-economy, and which is the
experience of the Thing as the transitional play of tendencies.
Here, and through the pharmakon, through the generalized transitionality imposed by the pharmacological situation, what is in
question as well as full of new questions is the affect that is adoption. Only an affected being can question, which presupposes that
it can above all be called into question by its affection.
It is in this sense that I refer3 to uncontrollable societies of disaffected individuals: it is because consumerism has industrially and
systemically ruined the process of adoption, that is, of transindividuation, by, as we have described, the systemic imposition of
short-circuits, in particular via the conservative revolution, that
contemporary pharmacology was held at a purely adaptive stage,
ruining the possibility of posing questions on the basis of what,
in this pharmacology, called the preceding epochs into question,
and in particular modernity.
What is referred to as ‘postmodernity’ is this misery and poverty
that is at once symbolic, political, spiritual and now economic –
for Europe has discovered with astonishment, and at its core, that
the symbolic poverty that is destroying so-called advanced industrial societies has now expanded to include economic poverty.
The enemy of individuation, that is, of the question, is adaptation, whereas the question constitutes the specific modality of
existence through which a ‘quantum leap in individuation’ takes
place. The being that we are and that we become is called into
question and poses its questions in a thousand ways – which are
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all masks of the Thing that lies behind all transitional objects,
those of the child as well as those which overturn an epoch in
order to install a new one.4
What constitutes here our point of entry into the political
economy of the question, which is always a pharmacology of the
question, and as it imposes itself in the context of the industrialization of the pharmakon, is the role of marketing – which
Heidegger does not examine, and nor does Jonas, Foucault or
Derrida, but in relation to which Deleuze introduced the new
science of control societies, in lieu and in place of the cybernetics
that Heidegger promoted to this rank. Marketing: confronted
with a process of technical internalization that constitutes an
absolutely singular pharmacological horizon the stakes of which
are literally unprecedented, marketing aims to impose adaptation
in order to short-circuit and bypass adoption, and to do so beyond
all measure.
As for adoption, in the sense given to this word here and also
in its everyday sense, a recent disturbing news report provides
insight into its contemporary stakes:
When little Artem Justin Hansen, who would turn eight years old
the following week, arrived alone on Thursday at Moscow airport,
he held in his hands a shocking message: a letter in which his adoptive mother, Tory-Ann Hansen, a thirty-four year old American,
stated she was cancelling his adoption and purely and simply
sending the boy back to his country of origin!
‘I adopted this child, Artem Saveliev on September 29, 2009.
This child is mentally unstable.’ So said the letter addressed to the
Russian Minister of Education, which ended as follows: ‘After
giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of
my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.
As he is a Russian National, I am returning him to your guardianship and would like the adoption disannulled.’
Placed into the care of Russian social services after arrival,
Artem had no idea of his adoptive mother’s intentions. When he
was put aboard the first flight in Tennessee, before changing planes
in Washington, Artem believed he was being sent on a tour of his
homeland. In his bag, his ‘mother’ had placed candy, cookies and
crayons for the trip. She had even bothered to pay an intermediary
she had found on the internet to meet him at the airport.5
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The most immense question posed by the industrialization of
the pharmakon, of which the internalization process is the extreme
stage and the advent of an incomparable if not radical novelty, is
the future of childhood, and not only its future but its very possibility – if one believes that childhood is something other than
human bondage, something other than an object of sexual consumption, a batch of fresh flesh offered for a polymorphous series
of fantasies typical of the contemporary consumer, from the
‘mother’ who seeks a ‘little companion’ for her child to the unrepentant paedophile, and that it is, rather, an age at which we
must be placed without condition under the protection of adults.
Faced with policies that repress children,6 or the mothers of
children,7 of whom Cosette and her mother are like patrons –
policies that are being pursued today especially in France, after
having been promoted in the United Kingdom by Tony Blair and
his ‘third way’, where the victims are children, and often also their
mothers, put in the position of tormenters, playing the role of
scapegoats – how can we not be seized and even choked by this
verse from Victor Hugo:
Alas! How many times must you be told,
All of you, that it was up to you to lead them,
That you needed to give them their place in the city;
That your blindness created theirs;
From a miserly tutelage, consequences follow,
And the harm they do to you, you did to them.
You failed to guide them, to take their hand,
And to teach them about the shadows and about the true path;
You have left them caught in the labyrinth.
They are your nightmare and you are their fear [. . .].8
And how not to weep when reading this passage from Plutarch,
who lived close to two thousand years ago in Antiquity, during
times thought to be so difficult to endure:
Nor are we to use living creatures like old shoes or dishes and
throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service;
but if it were for nothing else, but by way of study and practice in
humanity, a man ought always to prehabituate himself in these
things to be of a kind and sweet disposition. As to myself, I would
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not so much as sell my draught ox on the account of his age, much
less for a small piece of money sell a poor old man, and so chase
him, as it were, from his own country, by turning him [. . .] out of
the place where he has lived a long while.9
54.
Exteriorization as exclamation and
différance as words and gestures
We said that the secondary suspension in which consists the curative adoption of a pharmakon is the formation of a normative
therapeutic that therefore invents a new pathos – another kind of
philia as a new ‘form of life’ in society – by creating new long
circuits in transindividuation from out of an initial pharmacological shock.
An epokhe, as the metastabilization of a transindividuation
process that establishes an ‘understanding that being-there has of
its being’, is formed via multiple circuits of transindividuation
through which psychic individuals co-individuate and ultimately
transindividuate. This transindividuation is a matter of weaving
transgenerational circuits according to the paths of every form of
knowledge, whether it is mystagogical initiation or apodictic
learning, whereby there occur those moments that Winnicott
called creative, that Canguilhem called normative, and that Plato
called anamnesic. This is a question of anamnesis, of which psychoanalysis will make us aware of a wholly new experience, even
though it was already heralded in Plato’s Symposium.
In other words, when the secondary suspension takes place, it
tends to create new long processes of transindividuation. This is
contrary to what is provoked by primary suspension, which
bypasses or short-circuits transindividuation, replacing it with
individual, collective and mechanical automatisms, disindividuating psychic individuals and collective individuals who become
reactive, that is, blind, replacing their internalized knowledge
with retentional systems, thereby proletarianizing them.
Contrary to the first pharmacological moment, which above
all constitutes proletarianization, that is, a loss of knowledge (of
all kinds), the transindividuation that is reconstituted in the secondary suspension, that is, in the therapeutic moment of the
pharmakon, consists in creative activity (in Winnicott’s terms),
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and it is sublimatory in the sense that it generates new forms of
knowledge, new long circuits of transindividuation, opened by
new questions.
The first loss of knowledge to have been thought as such, and
thought as proletarianization, did not affect the know-how [savoirfaire] of workers’ gestures, nor the savoir-vivre of the consumers
that we are, or rather that we ‘are’ not, given that to be means to
exist, and that to exist is to know how to live. The first loss of
knowledge to have been thought as such, and thought as proletarianization, was the loss of the knowledge of how to think and
theorize that in the eyes of Socrates the pharmakon of writing may
constitute: it is hypomnesis as what above all discourages, atrophies and ultimately blocks anamnesis.10
In the second volume of De la misère symbolique, however, I
argued that noesis is a technesis.11 This would imply that:
• to receive is to make, that is, there is no perception that is not
a production – but in deferred time, in the difference operating
in the sensorimotor loop;
• perception is a passage to the act and an acting out both by the
sensed and the sensing, this passage to the act being therefore
an action and not merely a reaction;
• this action – which can itself be ‘reactive’ – is a praxis requiring
a tekhne.
Given all this, it follows that this tekhne is thoroughly pharmacological: it makes possible the creative or normative (that is, individuating) passage to the act just as much as the regressive,
normalized, adaptive and disindividuating passage to the act. In
the latter, the reactive noetic soul regresses to its sensitive level,
and proves, most of the time, to be noetic only in potential, and
to only be in action sensitively.12 This must be interpreted as a
regressive movement within libidinal economy to the benefit of
the drives and to the detriment of the libido itself – that is, of that
philia on to which every noesis opens, given that knowledge is,
more than anything, what weaves long circuits of transindividuation, that is, transgenerational circuits.
Only knowledge, in other words, insofar as it passes through
the experience of that which, not existing, all the more consists,
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only this knowledge makes it possible for successive generations
to inherit from each other, and to do so without annihilating each
other. This latter possibility could eventuate, either by one of them
(the adults) descending into perpetual infantilization, or by the
other (the children), as may be feared, entering into war with their
elders. Such intergenerational war will have its roots in the kinds
of reasons outlined in this book, but also in such things as the
feeling of younger generations that they ought not be obligated to
fund the retirement of their parents, given the degree to which the
latter have already mortgaged the futures of their own children.
These are the pharmacological questions posed by Winnicott
through clinical analysis of successful and unsuccessful experiences of the transitional object.
‘Sensitive’ (the word used by Aristotle to qualify psukhè) does
not mean that the sensible is opposed to the intelligible: sensitivity
is the regime of individuation specific to the movement of the
sensitive soul. But it is also the in itself of the noetic soul, to
borrow a term from Hegel’s interpretation (in History of
Philosophy)13 of Aristotle’s On the Soul. And this in itself, if we
rethink this term from the perspective of Freud and das Ding, is
not the instinctual material of the animal’s perceptual dynamics
but rather the material of the drives, which supplies its dynamism
(its dunamis) to libidinal energy (energeia).
The per-ception in action of meaning, conceived in this way,
sensibly noetic and noetically sensible, is also symbolic and technical, wherein the noetic soul is the différance of a per-ception that
is never a mere re-ception, but rather a production that gives back
and does not merely react, to the extent that it weaves one or more
circuits of transindividuation. When I feel or sense something, I
ex-press it in some way or other: sooner or later I make it sensible
to another – insofar as I sense or feel in a noetic way.
This circuit is that of the exclamation in which desire consists,
and which calls into question the one who exclaims. To exclaim,
which is not just to cry – which was the issue in the Project for a
Scientific Psychology and in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,14 but
on which exclamation builds as discharge – is a gesture, which
may be the articulation of a word or a humiliating slap in the face,
or an edifying work [oeuvre], or a type of work [travail], or any
technical exteriorization whatsoever.
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A word is above all this exteriority, which re-internalizes itself
as a highly artful [artificieux], idiomatic default, weaving a process
of transindividuation via the tongue within the mouth, through
which the default of origin speaks and signifies, while for their
part other organs also transindividuate and signify.
55.
Cries, crises and critiques of proletarianization
Two things must be added here:
• On the one hand, if this technical noesis is pharmacological,
which means that exclamation is not just a cry but the initiation
of a différance, then noesis always presupposes the process of
double redoubling on the circuits on which it is inscribed, and
such that it opens a krisis, a decision, which means that the
process of transindividuation is a critical process, in that first
sense of krisis in Hippocrates, where it referred to the moment
when the outcome of an illness is decided, which I thus relate
back to the question of pathogenetic epokhality typical of the
pharmacological-being that we are in becoming, that is, typical
of a noetic being insofar as it responds, precisely, to a question
arising from a challenge.
• On the other hand, something new is occurring today, as an
absolutely new challenge, and question, of pharmacological
becoming are imposed upon us. This is the challenge and the
question of transformational technologies,15 which must be
apprehended above all as the inversion of the process of exteriorization and as the interiorization of technics at, on the one
hand, the biological level, and, on the other hand, the physicochemical level.
How does this call us into question in new and very different
ways? It does so, above all, because transformational technologies
open possibilities for new types of short-circuits in the process of
transindividuation.
But we can say nothing relevant to this possibility and the
impossibilities it induces if we fail to understand that these new
types of short-circuits are themselves connected to other types of
short-circuits that appeared long ago and that have in fact always
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been contained in the poisonous character of the pharmacology
that is all prostheticity.
This obviously does not mean that there is nothing new to
think, or that there are no challenges, nothing that would call
anything into question. But it does mean that, in order to think
this novelty, it will be necessary to think a novelty that has
remained unthought, a longstanding novelty [une nouveauté déjà
ancienne] that arose in the nineteenth century as the fate of industrial societies, which is also to say, of globalization, this fate being
that of industrial proletarianization.
More challenging than proletarianization itself is that which
tends to prevent exclamation as the initiation of that différance
that is a thought (that is, a question) of the proletarianized. It is
thereby reduced to a cry, that is, condemned to stupidity.
56. Reproduction, selection and adoption
in the epoch of the industrial pharmakon:
the new critique of life
The true stake of techno-logical interiorization at the biological
and physico-chemical levels, for instance in the domain of reproductive technology, and more generally of biotechnologies (without
even mentioning here synthetic biology), is the possibility of
bypassing [court-circuiter] the mother, who becomes a pure belly,
either as a producer of eggs to be incubated elsewhere, or as an
incubating uterus, that is, as a feminine psychic individual who is
thus instrumentalized and proletarianized (the sexed body becoming pure ‘labour force’) through a division of labour instituting in
the world of human life a model founded on the functional
opposition between production and consumption.
This is a proletarianizing translation of the ‘procreatic’, such
that it is above all and before anything conceived, in all its forms
(forms proposed all the more readily after ‘ethical’ analyses that
merely enable us to dispense with thinking what is being called
into question, to avoid confronting the new questions that are
formed, and through that, the very question of the question – and
of its pharmacology), as a new market. Such a pharmacological
prostheticity of life as interiorization of the technical (de)fault, and
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as technique for interiorizing a (de)fault that is necessary, can
and must, however, be adopted. And this adoption must occur as
the crossing of a threshold in this history of adoption that pharmacological being has woven from its origin, and as its default
of origin.
This is obviously the complete opposite of the way in which
this technics of interiorization is being promoted: the ‘socialization’ of this transformational technology makes adoption precisely
impossible, being sold as ‘medical assistance’ by marketing campaigns such as the one seen in the London Underground, trading
on progenitive fantasies in the most consumerist way possible –
pending the arrival of what Henri Atlan calls the ‘artificial uterus’.16
The sterile seed developed by Delta & Pine Land and promoted
by Monsanto, the so-called Terminator seed, bypasses the farmer,
who no longer cultivates, but is instead employed (very insecurely)
by the agribusiness. The latter, by keeping hold of these transgenic
seeds, can exclude the farmer from the selection process – and it
is indeed the question of selection that is raised by this development. Selection, however, is also what occurs in transindividuation
in general, either through long circuits as the formation of transgenerational knowledge (which is at bottom always knowing how
to question), or through short-circuits as the destruction of
knowledge (as proletarianization).
Biotechnological selection can no doubt lead to the problem of
eugenics. But well before that, much more insidiously and therefore much more seriously than that, there arises the calling into
question of the selectors that we are, and it arises as the question
of a new proletarianization.
We are selectors insofar as we can question and therefore
respond, that is, transindividuate, and equally, insofar as we raise
our children, if we have any, or our students, if we educate any,
or minors in general, if we are adults, that is, mature [majeurs]
and conscious of our responsibilities. These children, these students and these minors question themselves and question us, questions that are posed to, and that impose themselves on, any mother
or any father faced with the irreducibility of age-difference and
the immense ‘out of joint’ in which time gives itself and withholds
itself in the same stroke – by going through this intergenerational
genealogy that tends towards and traverses das Ding.
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Circuits of transindividuation are above all what form and
supply selection criteria, which is also to say, (re)production
criteria. In an associated milieu, that is, in a dialogical process, in
both Plato’s and Bakhtin’s sense, this power of selection is thoroughly and organologically spread between actors, locutors, and
so on. The symbolic is thus inscribed in the systems produced by
sexual difference, which condition the relation between the generations, but which can also be technically modified. Savoir-vivre
consists in socializing a critical system, that is, a capacity to decide
(and all technique and technics is such a system), for example, in
relation to generation(s), where the voluntary termination of pregnancy established a new criteriological age, that is to say, a new
critique of life.
When selection is engrammed and automated in programmes
that govern retentional systems according to the model of the
industrial division of labour, and then of the functional couple
producer/consumer as the only model capable of absorbing the
costs of techno-capitalist investment, selection becomes dissociation, with all of the resulting effects that have been described in
previous works: it is no longer the result of collective individuation, that is, of implementing all the criteria deriving from
intergenerational transmission, which is the very process of
symbolization, of which the family is one mode and geometry
another. And it becomes entropic: it destroys the negentropy
that it is precisely the goal of all these criteriologies to create
as long circuits of transindividuation.
Today marketing exploits and destroys this intergenerational
genealogy: it ‘segments’ ages into niches and slots. The ages of an
existence, in their relation to the transitional object, and as the
experience of the pharmakon par excellence, are epochs of the
pharmakon during which and through which intergenerational
roles are constituted and transmitted. Having become categories
targeted by marketing, ages no longer form generations – as if
they are a degeneration of (the) generation itself.
Generation, insofar as it is always inherited from genitors and
dedicated to engendering, constitutes the elementary basis of transindividuation – in the first place as the transmission of names:
that intergenerational différance engaged by genitors and their
progeny, which can only occur as the legacy of an experience that
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must be internalized each time. The relation of care described by
Winnicott is above all this internalization. The latter develops in
a very wide diversity of forms throughout the course of one’s
education, which itself does not end with the exit from childhood
– given that the pharmacological being is always having experiences, it is always learning.
Whatever its forms, this learning-internalization is a process
of adoption. As the inverse of this learning and apprenticeship,
and of these adoptions, transmissions and transindividuations,
segmented markets operating via ‘age groupings’ are promoted
by pharmaka submitted to the adaptive processes in which
consumption naturally consists: that which is consumed cannot
be adopted, since on the contrary it must be immediately
disposable.
Hence we are brought into an age of systemic infidelity.
57.
For a new politics of adoption
Adoption is the condition of individuation of the pharmacological
being – so that the poison can become a remedy. Adaptation, on
the contrary, which destroys pharmacological knowledge, spreads
toxicity. To adapt is to proletarianize, that is, to deprive of knowledge those who must submit to that to which they are adapting
themselves. The great pharmacological turn of exteriorizationbecome-interiorization does not amount to a ‘post-humanist’
situation: it constitutes a pharmacological hyper-epokhality that
risks installing a situation of hyper-dissociation, that is, hyperproletarianization, and ultimately an unsustainable toxicity.
A process of proletarianization is the destruction of an associated milieu, that is, of a milieu of existence. It is only possible to
exist, for a psychic individual, by contributing to the individuation
of its milieu and by co-individuating with other psychic individuals. This contribution begins with the name given to the newborn,
through which he or she is initiated into a new circuit of intergenerational transindividuation – the condition of all psychic
singularity.
Nomination could and had to refer, for thousands of years, to
a symbolic calendarity prescribing names, to which new names
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refer like a spirit. That this calendarity fails when it is replaced
by a programme schedule dictates to us the scale of the consumerist system and the immense burden it brings, as well as the
necessity of creating a revolution (of declaring what is past: of
trans-forming).
To create such a revolution, thus transforming the pharmacological situation – making it pass through the second moment of
its epokhe – is to invert the situation that leads to the proliferation
of situations of infidelity, to abandonments and betrayals of all
kinds, from the victims of Monsanto17 to little Artem, situations
that the process of interiorization will not fail to spread if,
delivered over to a market imposing the production/consumption
model on all forms of reproduction, there results a massive proletarianization of interiorization and the disintegration of all forms
of adoption. In such conditions, the fate of Artem becomes the
norm: such would be the epoch of disposable children.
The question here is a politics of adoption, and this presupposes
a pharmacology of adoption. Adoption establishes a relation of
fidelity. Fidelity, however, is precisely what defines consumerism
insofar as it constitutes a systemic infidelity that, when the hegemony of consumerism reveals its carelessness [incurie], installs a
situation of mistrust that is generalized and spread as an apocalyptic feeling without God. In such conditions, the harmonious
socialization of transformational technologies, appropriate to processes of interiorization belonging to the most recent stage of
the pharmakon, becomes inconceivable.
Contemporary hyper-epokhality is therefore what calls us into
question, and above all in the premonition we have of the immense
systemic stupidity that it is sure to trigger. If it is true that the
generalized proletarianization that spread at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century as a
bypassing and short-circuiting not only of producers and consumers deprived of their savoir-faire and savoir-vivre, but also of theorists and scholars deprived of their theoretical knowledge, thereby
becoming proletarians of the spirit supplying their nervous energy
to systems that bypass and short-circuit them more and more
often, and more and more systemically, then we find ourselves
confronted with a situation that absolutely radicalizes the
pharmacological question.
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58.
Struggling against stupidity
Stupidity [bêtise] is what results from the destruction of circuits
of transindividuation. This ruin from which nobody escapes causes
shame, and it is from out of this shame, engendered by a stupidity
that it is a matter of harming,18 that one begins to think.19
Faced with stupidity, the question arises of the second pharmacological moment – which can clearly only be considered through
a critique of the first moment, that is, on the condition that a new
critique of political economy be constituted, as a new critique of
life. From out of this new critique of life, a politics of adoption,
which is also to say, of a selection assumed by an associated
milieu, must be constituted as the formation of new types of long
circuits of transindividuation, new precisely in that the development of the pharmakon and of the turn in pharmacology, and in
the pharmacology of the question, may obviously also, as a new
horizon of interiorization, intensify rather than short-circuit the
adoption process.
We must here pose the question of stupidity as such, that is, the
question of the unworthy [indigne] and the inhuman. This will be
the theme of another work. But I will nevertheless add, provisionally but by way of conclusion, that bêtise, which is not merely
stupidity (and this is one of the problems that the eponymous
work by Avital Ronell20 poses for a French reader), is what
renounces noesis and the noetic. In this respect, stupidity is what
opens the inhuman-being [êtrinhumain] that we are. The only
thing that, at bottom, is worth being lived – in this life that must
constantly be critiqued in order for it to be, in fact, worth living
– is the struggle against stupidity.21
Who or what is the inhuman-being? It is the one incapable of
promising – not the one incapable of keeping a promise, but incapable of promising this humanity that does not yet exist. Or barely
exists, hardly exists [ou à peine]: which only exists by toiling
[à la peine], that is, on the condition of labouring for its own
future. The inhuman-being is incapable of responding to what
does not yet exist.
Faced with this, the noetic is what attempts to affirm the noninhuman-being of what is always too human and more than
human, in excess and in default, shall we say, thinking of
Disposable Children
133
Canguilhem: the noetic is as such the being that promises, referred
to by Nietzsche as the being capable of standing as guarantor.
Such a being is what makes becoming happen [fait advenir le
devenir] as being – and as always remaining to-come as the highest
form of the will to power, capable of ‘imprinting on becoming
the character of being’.22
Notes and References
Introduction
1
2
This mother, the ‘good mother’, could clearly also be the father, or
some other guardian – and ultimately any benevolent and protective
psychic power. And this is the idea behind The Kid, in which
Chaplin takes on the maternal role to perfection.
Furthermore, in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), I drew attention
to the fact that Moses and Jesus are adopted children, the former
by Jochebed and Amran, the second by Joseph, notwithstanding
the fact that in the Koran filiation is defined not by blood but
by milk.
This means that care is what makes possible a process of adoption – of the child by its mother, and of the transitional object by
the mother–child pair, within which the ‘mother’ is the educator
through which is created what Bowlby described as the relation of
attachment – thus also the relation between Charlie and the Kid.
We shall see in this work, and in particular in Chapters 4 and 8,
that care is a process of adoption, and that it is to that extent precisely not adaptation. Adaptation is the source of the bad relation
to the transitional object, according to Winnicott (see p. 21).
We shall also see that it is because the non-inhuman-being is in a
thoroughly pharmacological situation that education is always an
adoptive relation.
‘La vie vaut le coup d’être vécue’: this phrase from Winnicott could
also have been translated into French as ‘vaut la peine d’être vécue’,
‘worth the effort of being alive’. And we shall see that pain or effort
Notes to pages 2–12
3
4
5
6
7
is a crucial subject in these matters (see the final part, ‘Pharmacology
of the Question’).
In Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, IL, and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
And it is necessary to relate this, as we shall see in what follows, to
what Freud and Lacan called das Ding.
This book emerged from a course I gave at Goldsmiths College at
the University of London, and from lectures delivered at the invitation of Cambridge, Columbia, Albany, Northwestern and Cardiff
universities. I wish to thank Scott Lash, Martin Crowley, Gerald
Moore, Benjamin Fong, Mark Taylor, Tom Cohen, Sam Weber,
Michael Loriaux and Laurent Milesi for hosting me.
A massacre that subsequently took place on 23 March 2002 at the
Nanterre town hall.
This was Husserl’s description of the planet on which we live
as non-inhuman-beings. See Edmund Husserl, ‘Foundational
Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of
Nature’, in Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 228.
Chapter 1
1
135
Apocalypse Without God
Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’, The Outlook for Intelligence
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 23.
2 On this question, see Christian Fauré, Alain Giffard and Bernard
Stiegler, Pour en finir avec la mécroissance. Quelques réflexions
d’Ars Industrialis (Paris: Flammarion, 2009).
3 Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’, p. 24, translation modified.
4 ‘The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us
in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle [. . .] this
crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.’ Valéry,
‘The Crisis of the Mind’, p. 25.
5 Ibid., p. 26.
6 Paul Valéry, ‘The European’, History and Politics (New York:
Bollingen, 1962), pp. 307–8.
7 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1970), pp. 5–6, translation modified.
8 Ibid., p. 6.
9 Ibid., p. 10.
10 Ibid.
136
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Notes to pages 12–16
Valéry, ‘Freedom of the Mind’, The Outlook for Intelligence, p. 186.
‘The Crisis of the Mind’ speaks of a spiritual physique.
Valéry, ‘Freedom of the Mind’, p. 191.
Ibid., pp. 187–9.
I have written on the relations between otium and negotium – terms
that Valéry does not employ – in The Decadence of Industrial
Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit, 1 (Cambridge: Polity, 2011),
pp. 131 ff.
Valéry, ‘Freedom of the Mind’, p. 188.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 196.
Ibid., p. 198.
Ibid., pp. 199–200.
Ibid., p. 200.
Ars Industrialis has made the question of the fall of spirit value, of
valeur esprit, its major object of analysis as well as of struggle – for
an industrial politics of technologies of spirit at the service of its
re-evaluation. See Ars Industrialis, Réenchanter le monde (Paris:
Flammarion, 2008).
Valéry, ‘Freedom of the Mind’, p. 201.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), p. 92.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 90.
Of which I have tried to outline a theory, as the genealogy of the
sensible, in De la misère symbolique 2. La catastrophè du sensible
(Paris: Galilée, 2005).
Valéry, ‘The European’, pp. 308–9.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002).
Jürgen Habermas reproduces a similar analysis in his first works,
through which he grounds his opposition between language and
technics. I have tried to show in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault
of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
why this opposition compromises in advance Habermas’s
political philosophy.
See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Technology and Science as “Ideology” ’,
Toward a Rational Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1970),
pp. 81–121.
Notes to pages 16–20
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
137
I have commented on these passages in Technics and Time, 1,
pp. 10–13.
It is to this immeasurable extent its own remedy, which is something
that Plato never thematized, while nevertheless indicating this possibility solely through the fact of presenting writing as a pharmakon,
whereas Husserl (ultimately), as well as Vernant, Détienne and
many others, made it the techno-logical condition of the life of
the rational, critical and contradictory spirit.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Hampshire and London:
Macmillan, 1929), pp. 164–5.
Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An
Introduction (Lincoln, NB, and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989).
And the fact that he values such intuitions is what separates Husserl
from Kant and brings him closer to Plato.
Translator’s note: ‘exteriorization’ has mostly been preferred over
‘externalization’ in order to indicate that when the author deploys
this term there is always, in addition to Winnicott, also a reference
to André Leroi-Gourhan and to his account of the role of exteriorization in hominization in his magisterial work, Gesture and Speech
(Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993).
I have tried to show this in Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time
and the Question of Malaise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2011), pp. 54–7.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1970).
What responds to this question is a kind of transcendental, providing access to archetypes (ideas), but these ‘have been given only
indirectly, at our birth, as an intuiting of copies (ectypa)’, as
Kant says in ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in
Philosophy’, Theoretical Philosophy After 1781 (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 432.
I have developed this point in De la misère symbolique 2. La
catastrophè du sensible, pp. 243 ff.
Knowledge as a long circuit of transindividuation is the theme of
Taking Care of Youth and the Generations.
As a result, Heideggerian analyses do not make it possible to think
the relation between calculation and the incalculable, determination
and the undetermined. See Technics and Time, 1, pp. 231 ff.
See Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010), pp. 29 ff.
138
Notes to pages 20–25
46 Leviticus XVI: 22.
47 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge,
1971), p. 3.
48 Ibid., p. 55.
49 Ibid., p. 87.
50 Ibid., pp. 87–8.
51 Ibid., p. 87.
52 I have proposed various sketches of this, notably in De la
misère symbolique 1. L’époque hyperindustrielle (Paris:
Galilée, 2004), and in The Decadence of Industrial Democracies,
pp. 36–40.
53 I have summarized those points in Marcuse that seem to me the
most important and the most problematic, in The Decadence of
Industrial Democracies.
54 Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, p. 45.
55 But this does not only take hold of the financial system, because it
will be imposed on the totality of social relations. See ibid., pp. 76
ff., p. 94 and p. 99.
56 See p. 30 and pp. 52–4.
57 See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 79 ff.
58 See pp. 34–5 and chapter 4.
59 See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks
(New York: Zone Books, 2006), ch. 6.
60 It is Gilles Deleuze who reactivates the question of the quasi-cause.
Yet Deleuze does not enable us to think the relation of desire and
technics, even though Nietzsche opened up this perspective – but
this is not how Deleuze will ever have read this – namely, that the
pharmaco-logical double of desire and technics, such that the one
cannot be found without the other, nor simply with the other, is
both apparently very close to, and yet completely lacking (if one
can say this), in what Yves Citton finds in his reading of Spinoza
and Tarde, ‘Les lois de l’imitation des affects’, Spinoza et les sciences
sociales (Paris: Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 69–102.
61 Marie Delcourt, Héphaïstos ou la légende du magicien (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1982).
62 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of
Sacrifice’, in Marcel Detienne and Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice
among the Greeks (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), pp. 78–86.
63 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholy’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 237–58.
Notes to pages 25–30
64
65
66
67
68
Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1985), p. 287.
Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 1.
The French translator of Plato, Monique Dixsaut, judiciously translates me amelesete – ameleai meaning ‘carelessness’, that is, the
opposite of melete and epimeleia – as ‘be not careless’ [ne soyez pas
négligents]. See Platon, Phédon (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 309.
On the question of epimeleia, see Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and
the Generations, pp. 135–6.
Phaedo 118a.
Pierre Grimal, Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine
(Paris: PUF, 1963), p. 54. ‘The cult of Asclepius [. . .] developed a
genuine school of medicine, the practices of which were mainly
magical, although they prepared the advent of more scientific medicine. This art was practiced by Asclepius, or by descendants of
Asclepius. The most celebrated is Hippocrates.’
Chapter 2
1
139
Pathogenesis, Normativity and the
‘Infidelity of the Milieu’
It is here necessary to analyse in depth all the links that are woven
between consumerist society, that is, the ‘American way of life’, and
pharmaka of all kinds – beginning with the consumerist drink par
excellence, Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by a pharmacist.
2 It would be more precise to speak with Simondon of ‘metastability’.
Canguilhem writes: ‘Physiology can do better than search for an
objective definition of the normal, [it must] recognize the original
normativity of life’. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the
Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 178, translation
modified.
3 Ibid., translation modified.
4 Ibid., pp. 200–1.
5 Ibid., pp. 196–7, translation modified.
6 Ibid., p. 197, translation modified.
7 Ibid., p. 198, translation modified.
8 See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, p. 101.
9 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, p. 200.
10 Ibid., translation modified.
11 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 87 ff.
12 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, p. 200.
140
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Notes to pages 30–35
Ibid.
Thérèse Brosse, ‘L’énergie consciente, facteur de régulation psychophysiologique’, L’évolution psychiatrique 1 (1938): 107.
This is what Taking Care of Youth and the Generations analysed
as the destruction of maturity, opinion and education by audiences
and psychotechnologies that capture attention, and it is also what
For a New Critique of Political Economy analysed as the proletarianization of intellectual work at the heart of so-called cognitive
capitalism.
Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, pp. 58–61.
See p. 14.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1984).
See p. 20.
Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 128–9.
Ibid., p. 95.
I will return to this primordial question for philosophy in La
Technique et le Temps 4. Symboles et diaboles (forthcoming). That
philosophy is love (philein) of knowledge and that love (eros) is the
experience of dependence affecting the lover, where the loved one
who structurally escapes this is thus the heteros par excellence,
which psychoanalysis calls the other, but which also presents itself
fusionally as a double of the autos, or more precisely as its ‘other
half’ – all this ought to lead to a reading of Plato and of the Ancients
generally in terms of the question of logos as passing through this
signal transitional experience that is also, for Aristotle, as philia,
the condition of all politics.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 72 ff., and pp. 95–6.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, pp. 201–2.
I am again taking up the problematic of socio-ethnic programmes,
explained in Disorientation in relation to Leroi-Gourhan, and
which, insofar as they metastabilize processes of transindividuation,
form what I call, commenting on Heidegger, an ‘already-there’.
On this term, see Technics and Time, 2, ch. 2.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, pp. 120–1.
Ibid., pp. 87–93.
Notes to pages 37–39
141
Chapter 3 Pharmacology of Nuclear Fire, Generalized
Automation and Total Proletarianization
1
2
3
Prometheus is the figure of precisely this après-coup.
See p. 123.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, pp. 122 ff., and For a New Critique
of Political Economy, p. 47.
4 What is accomplished here in the strategic field is lost in the social
field, something I try to describe in La télécratie contre la démocratie (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).
5 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1986).
6 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Psyche: Inventions of
the Other, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007),
p. 388.
7 Daniel Bensaïd paraphrases thus Books XXI and XIV of Confessions
in Marx l’intempestif (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 96.
8 This question of work is also on the horizon, clearly in a wholly
other mode, in Kant’s text, ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of
Superiority in Philosophy’, commented on by Derrida in ‘Of an
Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’ (in Harold Coward
and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 25–71), a text
which, very strangely, does not raise this theme, which is central.
The issue of Kant’s discourse is mystagogy – mystagogy, as what
makes possible mystagogues such as, according to Kant, certain
philosophers, for believing that it is possible to dispense with work.
In other words, Kant opposes work and mystagogy.
In a forthcoming work (Mystagogies 1. De l’art et de la littérature), I attempt to show that, on the contrary, work can only pass
through skill [métier], that is, mystery, and that all genuine work is
as such a kind of mystagogy. The question of mystery is precisely
that of métier, that is, of that work that is Kant’s theme, notably as
that work of the spirit that is philosophy, and of its pharmaka, and
this is a topic that is completely absent from this Derridian deconstruction which nevertheless follows the text of Kant step by step
– except for this step.
9 Bensaïd, Marx l’intempestif, p. 96. It is regrettable that Bensaïd
speaks here of ‘particular’ time, and that he does not see the abyss
that separates the particular from the singular, which he treats
almost synonymously.
10 See Ars Industrialis, Réenchanter le monde, pp. 48–55.
142
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Notes to pages 40–50
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 390. Translator’s note:
the published English translation of this text differs from the
French version, lacking the precise phrase to which Stiegler subsequently draws attention, concerning ‘Bergsonian, Husserlian and
Heideggerian categories’.
This is how Kant characterizes the finitude of the critical subject:
contrary to divine understanding, its intuition is not creative but
receptive, and the objects of its intuition can only be given through
experience.
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, pp. 406–7, my emphasis.
Ibid., p. 407.
In the Bakhtinian sense that also contaminates Platonic dialectic.
Heraclitus, fragment 52: ‘Time is a child at play, playing backgammon. The royalty is a child’s.’
In Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris:
Galilée, 2003), p. 9.
It is not only criticism, that is, critique according to Kant, that
Derrida calls into question, but the critical possibility in its
greatest generality, and, in the case of the ‘absolute pharmakon’,
this includes ‘analysis’, ‘decomposition’ and ‘division’. See Derrida,
‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, pp. 406–7.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in David Wood and
Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Differance (Warwick: Parousia
Press, 1985), p. 4.
Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, pp. 406–7.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology
(New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 123, translation modified.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London:
Routledge, 1994), p. 10.
Ibid., p. 189 n. 6.
Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 19.
Ibid., p. 118.
Ibid., p. 129.
Edmund Husserl, ‘The Origin of Geometry’, in Derrida, Edmund
Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, p. 164.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, pp. 57–64.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
‘If there is an art of photography (beyond that of determined genres,
and thus in a quasi-transcendental space), it is found here. Not that
Notes to pages 50–54
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
143
it suspends reference, but that it indefinitely defers a certain type of
reality, that of the perceptible referent. [. . .] As for the truth of
revelation, it is not only exposed but in the same movement inscribed,
situated, adjusted – in the way the developer “reveals” – within the
system of the optical apparatus. Within the process of development.
Within the functioning of a techne whose truth, in turn, etc.’ Jacques
Derrida, Right of Inspection (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998),
no page numbers (but cf., Droit de regards (Paris: Minuit, 1985),
p. xxxv).
We will return to this point on pp. 60 ff.
See Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, p. 124.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 734.
See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 76–7.
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
(Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
p. 351.
See Bernard Stiegler, ‘To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us: From
September 11 to April 21’, Acting Out (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009).
Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 69–70.
Translator’s note: ‘Pensée unique’ is a French term developed as part
of a critique of certain political tendencies in France and elsewhere.
It refers to the convergence of mainstream political discourse around
what is broadly referred to as neoliberalism and to the feeling that
there is in fact less and less difference to be found between ostensibly
‘opposed’ political parties.
Translator’s note: ‘charger’, which in French most often means ‘to
load’ or ‘to burden’, also carries the sense of responsibility or of
‘taking care’, as, for example, to take care of one’s children.
See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 127 ff.
Again, the transitional object is the matrix of a formation as well
as of a possible deformation of attention.
Plato, Protagoras 314a–b.
Simone Weil, ‘Factory Time’, in Barry Castro (ed.), Business and
Society: A Reader in the History, Sociology, and Ethics of Business
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 92,
translation modified. I thank Denis Guénoun for alerting me to
this text.
Ibid., p. 93, translation modified.
Winnicott suggests elsewhere and on many occasions that what is
described in the adult as concentration, that is, attentional capacity,
144
Notes to pages 54–63
is what is elaborated in the creative relation to the transitional
object: ‘Milner (1952) relates children’s playing to concentration in
adults’ (Playing and Reality, p. 52); ‘To get to the idea of playing
it is helpful to think of the preoccupation that characterizes the
playing of a young child. The content does not matter. What matters
is the near-withdrawal state, akin to the concentration of older
children and adults’ (p. 69); ‘Nevertheless, playing and cultural
experience are things that we do value in a special way; these link
the past, the present, and the future; they take up time and space.
They demand and get our concentrated deliberate attention, deliberate but without too much of the deliberateness of trying’ (p. 147).
47 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1973).
48 This is what I have tried to show in ‘The Magic Skin; or, The
Franco-European Accident of Philosophy after Jacques Derrida’,
Qui Parle 18 (2009): 97–110.
49 Stiegler, La télécratie contre la démocratie, pp. 247–66.
Chapter 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
The Thing, Kenosis and the Power to Infinitize
On this subject, see Les Entretiens du nouveau monde industriel
2009. Available at: <http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/non-classe/
entretiens-du-nouveau-monde-industriel/>.
Mark C. Taylor, Errancy: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago, IL,
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 21.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974),
§125.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 283–397.
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
1992).
Bernard Baas, De la chose à l’objet, Jacques Lacan et la traverse de
la phénoménologie (Paris: Peeters & Vrin, 1998).
Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, in Things: A Story of
the Sixties and A Man Asleep (London: Vintage, 1999).
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London and New York:
Verso, 1996).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL, and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Notes to pages 63–77
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
145
Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck,
1956), two volumes.
Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, pp. 12–13.
Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of
Alcoholism’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973),
pp. 280–308.
Translator’s footnote: ‘normative’ is intended here in Canguilhem’s
sense that distinguishes the normative from the normal, where the
former is something like a ‘metastable’ normal, a temporarily apparent norm within an ongoing process of becoming.
Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective (Paris:
Aubier, 2007), p. 162, and see my commentary in the preface,
p. iv.
Translator’s note: the word here translated as ‘facilitations’ is frayages, which is the French translation of the Freudian term die
Bahnung, found mainly in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’
but also in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is used in relation to
the neurological model of psychic functioning and contains the
sense of the breaking open of a pathway. Cf., Jean Laplanche
and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis
(London: Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 157–8.
Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 128–9.
Ibid., p. 95.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989),
p. 250.
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London and New York:
Routledge, 1972), pp. 133–4, translation modified.
Ibid., p. 134, translation modified.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 11–12.
Economics speaks of ‘diseconomy’ to describe the anti-economic
effects of negative externalities, that is, the toxicities that are not
financially sanctioned and that are therefore not socialized, that is,
supported by collectives.
Bernard Stiegler, Pour en finir avec la mécroissance (Paris:
Flammarion, 2009), p. 32; Stiegler, Constituer l’Europe tome 2.
Le motif européen (Paris: Galilée, 2005), pp. 28 ff.
This was recalled by Martin Heidegger in ‘Nietzsche’s Word: “God
Is Dead” ’, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism’, Steps
to an Ecology of Mind, p. 300.
146
Notes to pages 77–98
26
Knowledge aims towards a consistence that is infinitive. This infinite
motive is what weaves long circuits in transindividuation.
27 These are the stakes of the economy of contribution. See Stiegler,
For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 124–5.
Chapter 5 Economizing Means Taking Care:
The Three Limits of Capitalism
1
2
3
In the sense given to this term by Alain Mille.
See Stiegler, Pour en finir avec la mécroissance.
Attention understood in this sense is the intentional act par excellence, as passage to the act of intentionality, to the degree that it
must be structurally apprehended as aiming at a consistence, that
is, at an inexistent, or in other words at an eidetic kernel. This is
clearly not at all the sense intended by Husserl in what Natalie
Depraz translated as Phénoménologie de l’attention (Paris: Vrin,
2009), a work I had not read at the time of writing this chapter.
4 See the website for this institute, available at: <http://criticalclimatechange.com/>.
5 This was the subject of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker,
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007).
6 See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 73–6.
7 Jeremy Rifkin, Engager la troisième révolution industrielle,
un nouvel ordre du jour énergétique pour l’UE du XXIe siècle
(Paris: Fondation pour l’innovation politique, 2008).
8 Ibid., p. 5. Cf., Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race
to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Cambridge: Polity,
2009), p. 517.
9 Stiegler, Pour en finir avec la mécroissance, ch. 3. It is this approach
that drives the activities of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation.
10 Marie-Anne Dujarier, Le Travail du consommateur (Paris: La
Découverte, 2008).
11 Dialogical in the sense of both Plato and Bakhtin.
12 Translator’s note: the original French version of this work included
a chapter 6 (‘Économie de l’incurie’) and chapter 7 (‘Tendances
techniques, organologie generale et puissance publique’) that are not
included in this English translation, as they have previously been
published in For a New Critique of Political Economy under the
title ‘Pharmacology of Capital and Economy of Contribution’. Thus
chapters 6 and 7 in this volume are in fact chapters 8 and 9 in the
original French publication.
Notes to pages 102–106
Chapter 6
1
147
The Time of the Question
On this theme, see Stiegler, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism: Disbelief
and Discredit, 3 (forthcoming).
2 See pp. 37–8.
3 See p. 53.
4 See Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 96–8.
5 In For a New Critique of Political Economy.
6 See pp. 126–7.
7 This hypothesis was examined in the 2008/9 seminar led by Ars
Industrialis at the Collège International de Philosophie under the
title ‘Économie générale et pharmacologie’.
8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1996), p. 6.
9 And which is taken up by science fiction, notably in Michael
Crichton’s Prey (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
10 See pp. 34–5.
11 This was the subject of a work by Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger
and the Question, a citation from which formed the epigraph of
Part I of this book. In Of Spirit, Derrida on the one hand relates
the question of spirit to the question of the question, but on the
other hand places in question the question of the question: ‘How,
without confirming it a priori and circularly, can we question this
inscription in the structure of the Fragen from which Dasein will
have received, along with its privilege (Vorrang), its first, minimal,
and most secure determination?’ (p. 18). It is precisely this question
of the question and of what precedes the question that I am attempting here to explore. And I am attempting to do so insofar as it relates
to the question of spirit and conditions the entire question of spirit,
precisely as a pharmacology of spirit.
12 In questioning, Dasein is the one able to pose the question of being,
from which it seems that being cannot be reduced to a being and
thus, we might say, is not a thing. But is it not, then, the Thing? I
will return to this question in La Technique et le Temps 5. La guerre
des esprits in examining the way in which Lacan wilfully misreads
‘The Thing’ (in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New
York: Harper, 1975), pp. 163–86) in his interpretation of Freud’s
das Ding. And, as for Heidegger’s highly mystagogical text, it would
be necessary to show how the two extracts below could be inverted:
‘What, then, is the thing as thing, that its essential nature has never
yet been able to appear? Has the thing never yet come near enough
for man to learn how to attend sufficiently to the thing as thing?
148
13
14
15
16
17
18
Notes to pages 108–113
What is nearness?’ (p. 171). ‘To be sure, the Old High German word
thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate
on a matter under discussion, a contested matter. In consequence,
the Old German words thing and dinc become the names for an
affair or matter of pertinence. They denote anything that in any way
bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter
for discourse [or questioning]’ (p. 174).
On the question of the automaticity of technics, if not of the pharmakon, see David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back Through
Technology and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
Thomas Mann, The Tables of the Law (London: Haus, 2010),
p. 14, translation modified. (Translator’s note: the original German
is fragliche, rendered in Marion Faber and Thomas Lehmann’s
recent English translation as ‘problematic’, whereas the French
translation cited by Stiegler refers to l’origine douteuse.)
If the Third Republic had to battle against the toxic control
exerted by the Church on souls through a politics that can only
be understood in relation to the struggles of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation, the poisoners today mostly lie on the
other side.
Freud introduced the question of the unheimlich through the figure
of the double, Olympia, in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’. See Freud,
‘The Uncanny’.
Jean Jaurès, cited in Jacques Derrida, ‘My Sunday “Humanities” ’,
Paper Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
p. 100. I thank Charles Sylvestre for alerting me to this text delivered by Derrida in 1999 at the Fête de l’Humanité.
See p. 24. We must here cite, in relation to desire, two analyses by
Dominique Lecourt of technics in the epoch of the ‘post-human’
fantasy: ‘A “decoupling” [décrochage] occurs that makes the human
being a singular animal; we imagine that through a very gradual
process, it becomes the animal that we are. The human is the animal
who is not adapted to its milieu, contrary to what is implied by a
vocabulary of Lamarckian origin, used and abused by educational
psychology; the human is on the contrary the one who actively
adapts his environment to his desires, which prove to be as insatiable as they are diverse. The essence of technics, if one may speak
in these terms, lies here: through it, human beings detach themselves
from their animality, which remains theirs not as a being of needs,
nor as a being having reason, but as a desiring being’ (Humain,
Notes to pages 113–118
19
20
21
22
23
24
25.
149
posthumain: la technique et la vie (Paris: PUF, 2003), p. 43). ‘Would
there not be another path, that of normative invention? This path
amounts not to a recourse to the super-human, nor is it to succumb
to the vertigo of the post-human, but rather to build upon one of
the preeminent qualities of the human being: its capacity to constantly reinvent its way of being human on the basis of the achievements and realizations of its own genius. In the fifteenth century
Jean Pic de La Mirandole referred to this quality as “human dignity”
– that which creates its own value’ (ibid., p. 48). It is tempting here
to return – in the face of this question of dignity – to Valéry, and
to spirit value [valeur esprit]. But it would then be necessary to again
pose the question of the organology of spirit which, pharmacologically, is also what constantly inverts itself into its opposite and,
becoming poison, engenders the indignity of the inhuman, and of
what I have attempted to refer to in Taking Care of Youth and the
Generations (§53) as inhuman-being [êtrinhumain]. For such is the
being of desire: inhabited by the inhuman yet all too human drives
– those about which we indulgently say, ‘it’s human . . .’ The normative inventiveness that I am myself advocating presupposes a pharmacological critique that, as we have seen, requires a new critique
of political economy. It cannot ignore the irreducible ambiguity of
that pharmakon that is all technics, and the potential indignity
contained in every aspiration to dignity.
Vernant, ‘At Man’s Table’, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the
Greeks, pp. 35–6.
‘[D]iscursive understanding must employ much labor on resolving
and again com-pounding its concepts according to principles, and
toil up many steps to make advances in knowledge’ (Kant, ‘On a
Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy’, Theoretical
Philosophy after 1781, p. 431). In Mystagogies 1 (forthcoming), I
try to show that Kant, in his thought of aesthetic judgment, struggling here against a mystagogical penchant of philosophy that, out
of laziness, cannot escape mystification, nevertheless himself poses
that the experience of beauty and the reflective judgment that is
its expression are irreducibly mystagogical.
See p. 141, n.8.
See pp. 20–1.
On this notion, see Bernard Stiegler, Économie de l’hypermatériel
et psychopouvoir (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008).
Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, §52.
Ibid., pp. 124ff.
150
Notes to pages 119–122
Chapter 7
1
2
3
4
5
6
Disposable Children
Heidegger, Being and Time, §17.
This presupposes the explanations provided in Technics and Time,
3, ch. 3.
In Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected
Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit, 2 (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
It is as a relation to the pharmakon that a question can impose itself
and pose itself, and this position of a question is above all an object
relation, where the privilege that we accord to the verbal relation
lies in the objectification that takes place with the written word,
discretized and spatialized through grammatization – a privilege
that, in societies of mana and hau, is still largely distributed among
things, of which Perec’s Things announces the obsolescent and
essentially disposable fate.
‘Une Américaine renvoie en Russie l’enfant qu’elle avait adopté’,
Le Parisien, available at: <http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/uneamericaine-renvoie-en-russie-l-enfant-qu-elle-avaitadopte-10-04-2010-880860.php>.
On the criminalization of youth and children, see Taking Care of
Youth and the Generations, ch. 1, or, on keeping files on three-yearold children, see Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals
and http://www.pasde0deconduite.org/appel/, or the policies penalizing families whose children are absent from school, and so on.
The États généreux pour l’enfance is dedicated to analysing and
denouncing this literally shameful politics: ‘The “General State of
Childhood” released by the Secretary of State for the Family will
not lead to the improvement of the situation of children. Maintaining
current policies, it proceeds from a logic that is detrimental to children and for the whole of society: presenting youth as a problem
for society; making families solely responsible for the difficulties of
their children; claiming that restraining children, isolating those that
cause problems, and controlling behaviour, will protect society. In
the face of this general state [états generaux] of children, our
Generous State [États générEux] declares grievances! Close to eighty
organizations – collectives, associations, unions – have combined to
launch États générEux pour l’enfance and provide a comprehensive
review of government policies concerning children. They combined
their views into a List of grievances in support of children. This laid
out the basis of an overall, positive national policy FOR children,
representing the interests of children and respecting them and their
families, while listening to the professionals and organizations that
accompany them.’
Notes to pages 122–133
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
151
For instance, the politics of control implemented in the United
Kingdom by Tony Blair and his ‘New Labour’ against single mothers
whose children are a priori considered to be potential delinquents
– as if this were not so for the whole world, from Sarkozy to the
Pope, and passing through Madoff and his ‘victims’.
Victor Hugo, ‘À ceux qu’on foule aux pieds’ [‘To those trampled
underfoot’], L’Année terrible, 1872. I would like to thank Robin
Renucci, who brought this poem to my attention.
Plutarch, ‘Marcus Cato’, Plutarch’s Lives: The Translation Called
Dryden’s (New York: Bigelow, Brown & Co., no date), p. 355.
Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 29 ff.
Stiegler, De la misère symbolique 2, pp. 61–71.
Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, ch. 4.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, 1825–6. Volume II: Greek Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 283–397; Jacques Lacan,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1992).
This will be one of the subjects discussed in Stiegler, Prendre
soin 2.
Henri Atlan, L’Utérus artificiel (Paris: Seuil, 2007).
According to the 25 May 2010 issue of the Canadian newspaper
Le Devoir, two hundred thousand small Indian cotton growers have
committed suicide in the east of Maharashtra since 1997: ‘Fertilizers
have depleted the soil, which provides less and less, the price of
cotton has fallen, and it becomes necessary to take on debt in an
unsustainable way in order to purchase every year the genetically
modified seeds that do not occur naturally.’
Translator’s note: the author is here referring to Nietzsche’s discussion, in The Gay Science, of ‘harming stupidity’ (see §328).
I have begun to explore these questions in Uncontrollable Societies
of Disaffected Individuals, p. 24, and in Constituer l’Europe 1:
Dans un monde sans vergogne (Paris: Galilée, 2005).
Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2002).
On this point I diverge completely from the analyses of Avital
Ronell.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books,
1967), §617, translation modified.
Index
accounting 60, 61
adaptation 32, 35, 45, 64, 68,
76, 102, 105–6, 108, 113,
116, 120–1, 130
addiction 3, 25, 64
generalized 27, 89
addictogenic society 27, 30, 32
adoption 35, 45, 127–30, 128
as infinitization 113
a new politics of 130–3
news report (Artem) 121, 131
a pharmacology of 25, 131
short-circuiting 103, 105–6,
121
transindividuation as 101–2,
105–6, 107, 117–18, 130
transitional 3, 45, 120
Adorno, Theodor 18, 20, 46, 50,
52, 59
Dialectic of Enlightenment
15–16, 22
affect 23, 120
agape 78
alcoholism 77
Bateson’s theory of 64
alienation 15
anamnesis
geometric 49
and hypomnesis 2, 16, 18–19,
49, 115, 124
and transindividuation 18–19,
31, 41, 48, 106, 123
Anders, Günther 63
anthropogenesis 20, 65
as pathogenesis 27–30
apocalypse, without God 9–26,
62, 131
après-coup 21, 34–6, 37, 41–2,
49–50, 54–6, 65, 77
Arendt, Hannah 63
Aristotle 62, 125
On the Soul 23, 125
Arpanet 38
Ars Industrialis 54–5, 97
art works
proletarianization of
49–50
transitional object as origin of
3
Asclepius 26
Atlan, Henri, on ‘artificial uterus’
128
Index
attention 4, 23, 25, 32, 51, 81–2,
84, 89
care as paying 4, 81–2, 86–7
as control of intentionality 54
destruction of 52, 81–4, 91,
92
psychic and social 23, 81–2,
84–7
‘attention deficit disorder’ 81
Augustine, Saint 39
Auroux, Sylvain 49, 60
automation, generalized 37–56,
49
automaton 37–9, 44–5, 53
autonomy 2–3, 19–20, 34
absolute 41, 44
as adoption of potential/
transitional space 21, 25
and heteronomy 2, 4, 25, 34,
41, 107–8, 114, 116
relational or dialogical 41, 44
sublimation as condition of
34
of thought 2
Baas, Bernard 62
Bakhtin, Mikhail 48, 129
banality 51, 112
Bateson, Gregory, theory of
alcoholism 64
Baudrillard, Jean 62
Bauman, Zygmunt, on ‘liquid
society’ 64
becoming 14–15, 104–6, 107–8,
113–16
and being 14–15, 120–1,
126–7, 132–3
flexible 64
good or evil 26, 71
not-yet-being-there 111–13
questioning 110–11
without future 53
153
being
and becoming 14–15, 120–1,
126–7, 132–3
in default 15, 113–14
the forgetting of (aletheia)
109
ideal 34
inhuman 118, 132–3
noetic 106–7
pharmacological 33–4, 55–6,
75, 104–6, 130
the question of 107–9, 115
questioning 110
being-there see Dasein
belief 59, 61, 111
Benjamin, Walter 16, 49
Bensaïd, Daniel 39
Bernays, Edward Louis 55, 95
Besorgen 25, 83
Bildung 15
biopolitics 98
biopower 27, 50, 88
biotechnology 104, 117, 127–8
Blair, Tony 122
body
pharmacology of the 60
the sexed as pure labour force
127
and soul 49
books 60–1, 72
brain
as living organ of
transindividuation 68–70
and mediatized milieu 66–8
organology of the 69–70
Brosse, Thérèse 30, 31
calculability 15, 17, 59–61, 75,
76
Canguilhem, Georges 39, 133
on normativity 28–9, 30, 67,
76, 118, 123
154
Index
Canguilhem, Georges (cont.)
The Normal and the
Pathological 28–9, 30
capabilities (Sen) 96–7, 132–3
capital, pharmacology of 51, 78,
79–98, 103
capitalism 39, 50–1, 55, 75
as addictive process 89–90
cognitive 102
crisis of 59, 63
the spirit of (Weber) 51, 90
the three limits of 81–98
care 1–5, 41, 75, 78
of the collective 97–8
economizing as taking
81–98
and fire of desire 24–5, 78
and libidinal energy 90–4
loss of 5, 91, 103, 131
maternal 1–4, 20–2
in a new libidinal economy 65,
88, 96–8
for oneself 41–2
as paying attention 81–2,
86–7
philosophy of 24
politics of 97–8
the question of in capitalism
87–8
relation of 1–4, 20–2, 53–4,
68–9, 70, 77, 130
theory as a rational form of
32–3, 53
cathexis 47–8
child psychiatry 66
childhood, future of 122, 125
children
disposable 119–33
maternal care 1–4
synaptogenesis of 66–7, 69
Christ, Jesus 20
Christakis, Dimitri A. 66
Church, power of the 50
circuits
anamnesic and hypomnesic
19
of desire 19, 72, 77, 125
long 19, 25, 35, 53, 68, 86–7,
102, 105, 117, 120, 123–6,
132–3
short 19, 22–3, 25, 35, 39–40,
63, 69, 70, 76, 84, 102,
120–1, 126–7
social within cerebral 67, 69
transgenerational 123, 124–5
citizenship 19–20
civilizations 24, 35–6, 42
co-individuation 18, 21, 67,
130–1
cognitive technologies 102
Cohen, Tom 85
Cold War 32
compliance 21
computer systems 102
concept, Kantian a priori 17,
18
conception 51–2
consciousness
as attention 23
in critique 48
intentional (Husserl) 84
‘conservative revolution’ 103,
120
consistences 2, 31, 33–4, 35, 45,
47, 52, 67, 68, 69–70, 77,
78, 94, 124
consumerism 10, 15–16, 20,
22–3, 27, 62, 64–5, 74, 76,
96, 102–3, 120, 131
American 87–8, 91
consumption 22, 27, 51, 52, 54,
90–1
based on abandonment 64,
130
Index
defined 91
drive-based 94
and production 51–2, 90–1,
92–3, 94–5, 102, 127, 129,
131
replaced culture 89, 92
contribution, economy of 54–6,
103
control societies 81–2, 83, 89,
95, 102, 121
Copenhagen summit (2009) 9
creativity 30, 32, 34, 39, 54, 56,
67, 123
as art of living 21
destruction of transitional 76
infantile 68
thought as 33
crisis
economic and spiritual 5, 9,
10–11
environmental 83
of global finance 22–3, 59
of proletarianization 126–7
criteriology 117, 129
critical theory 15–17, 22
criticism
or hyper-criticism 42
Kantian 40, 46
nuclear 38–9, 40–1, 42–3, 44,
45
relational 44–5
critique 40, 48, 95, 114
double 48
new 16, 22–3, 32–4, 43, 50–1,
78, 127–30, 132–3
cultural experience 30, 34, 71
culture
origins in transitional object 3,
20–1
threat to 13–14, 30–2, 89
culture industry, critique of
15–16, 22, 95
155
Dasein 105, 107–9, 114
De la misère symbolique (Stiegler)
124
decision 5, 38, 52, 53, 103,
126–7, 129
deconstruction 42–3, 44–5
limits of 42
default
adoption of a 101–2
of being 15, 113–14
necessary (défaut qu’il faut) 21,
23, 24, 26, 42, 75, 77, 102,
105, 116–18, 128
of origin 106–9, 113–14,
116–18, 126, 128
technical 24, 127–8
definition 18, 67, 105
Deleuze, Gilles 34, 45, 89, 111,
121
democracy 38, 89–90
demoralization 104
dependence 2–3, 34, 71
and melancholy 25
pharmacological 64–5
deproletarianization 45, 49–54,
55, 97
Derrida, Jacques 4, 19, 37, 38,
40, 45, 47, 49, 51, 54, 112,
115, 121
on nuclear criticism 40, 42, 43,
44
Of Spirit 7
‘Plato’s Pharmacy’: commentary
on Phaedrus 2
Speech and Phenomena 54
Descartes, René 61
desire
beyond oneself 45
as the binding of the drives
51
circuits of 19, 72, 77, 125
elimination of 88, 90, 92
156
Index
desire (cont.)
fire of 24
horizon of 24
and infinity of objects 66
objects of 45, 62–3, 75, 78,
89, 92
pathology and 27
reason and 23, 47
structure of 62, 113
time of savoir-faire as 39–40
destruction, drive of 3–4, 9–10,
31, 51, 63, 91, 92
dialogue 18, 48, 68
différance 50–1, 115, 127
intergenerational 129–30
as words and gestures 123–6
digital networks 37–9, 81–2,
95–6, 103
Ding, das 62–3, 78, 101, 105,
107, 110, 113, 116–18, 125,
128
unheimlich 106–8
see also Thing, the
disadjustment 15, 29, 32, 104
disapprenticeship 30–2, 53
disenchantment 59, 75, 76
disindividuation 27, 35, 68, 70,
76, 90, 116, 123
disintoxication 55–6
disposability, generalized 63–4,
119–33
dissociation 33, 39, 98, 129,
130
domesticity 24
Drexler, Eric 106
drive-based economy 88, 91, 92,
94
drives
binding of the 24, 25, 51, 76,
125
destructive 3–4, 9–10, 31, 63,
91, 92, 124
Dujarier, Marie-Anne 96
Durn, Richard 4, 51
eating, healthy 55
economizing, as taking care
81–98
economy
‘attention’ 81–2
of contribution 54–6, 103
crisis 5, 9–10, 11, 22–3,
59–60
new models 91
spiritual and material 12–14,
51
education 30, 31, 128, 130
elpis 25
energy policy 55, 90–4
Enlightenment 12, 15, 42
extinction of 11–12
environment see milieu
epimeleai 95, 115
epimetheia 34, 45, 52
episteme 18, 19
epokhe 35, 41, 101, 119–20,
123, 131
Eros 25, 78
ethics 23, 97, 127
eugenics 128
European Union 98
exappropriation (Derrida) 45,
54
existence 33, 120–1, 124
the ages of 129–30
energy of 92–4
of humanity 112–13, 118
and infinity 76–7
a new politics of 98
science and 11–12
see also Dasein; libidinal energy
expectation 62, 85, 96
experience, condition of
possibility 46–7
Index
exteriorization 67–8, 109–10,
112, 113, 115, 116–17
as exclamation 67–8, 123–6
factory 52–3, 74
fact(s), sciences of and humanity
of 11–12
family 129
fault
displacement of 101
the height of 112–13
feeling
apocalyptic 9–10, 27, 30, 31,
35–6, 51, 104, 131
of existing, loss of 1–5, 51,
64–5
of good health 29–30
of life worth living 1–5, 41
fetishized objects 23, 25, 66
fidelity 59, 61, 62–3, 64, 65, 69,
75, 76, 98, 131
figuration 17
finance, crisis of global 22–3,
82–4
financialization 83, 89, 103
finitization 40, 46, 75, 108, 113
fire
as civilizing process 24, 42,
55–6
see also nuclear fire
Foucault, Michel 35, 84, 118,
121
Discipline and Punish 87
The Archaeology of Knowledge
87
The Order of Things 87
France, ‘cultural exception’
measures 30
Frankfurt Institute of Social
Research 15
Franklin, Benjamin 61
‘French theory’ 21
157
Freud, Sigmund 32, 43, 44, 55,
62, 70, 75, 78, 101, 110,
125
letter to Fliess 25
Massenpsychologie 14
Project for a Scientific
Psychology 62, 67, 125
on sublimation 24–5, 34,
71
fundamentalism 30, 109
future 4–5, 81–2, 84–7, 107–8,
132–3
of childhood 122, 125
garage sales 62–3
genealogy 33, 72, 114, 128,
129–30
of the sensible 69
geometry 17, 33, 46, 49, 86,
115, 129
gesture
différance as 123–6
grammatization of 60, 70, 87
Gille, Bertrand 29, 31
globalization 9–10, 89–90,
102–3, 127
God 65
apocalypse without 9–26, 62,
131
belief in 61
the death of 46, 61, 64, 72,
75, 78
existence of 78
Husserl on 46
the question of 108–9
goodness, or evil 71–2
Google 83
governmentality, techniques of
95
grammatization 22, 39, 44, 50,
51, 70, 72, 76, 87, 114
digital 55, 70, 94, 95–6
158
Index
grammatization (cont.)
and nihilism 59–62, 77
of production 74, 115
second technological revolution
of 60
of transindividuation 82–4,
97–8, 101–2
grammatology 22, 44, 69
Habermas, Jürgen 15, 16
hau 72
health 3, 28–9, 31–2, 55, 118
Hegel, G.W.F., History of
Philosophy 125
Heidegger, Martin 7, 25, 61, 106,
109–10, 115, 121
Being and Time 105, 114, 119
Hephaestus, fire of 24
Hesiod 25
Hestia 24, 51
heteronomy, and autonomy 2, 4,
25, 34, 41, 107–8, 114,
116
Hippocrates 52, 126
Hitler, Adolf 11
hominization 109–10, 113
Horkheimer, Max 18, 20, 46, 50
Dialectic of Enlightenment 15,
22
Hugo, Victor 122
humanism 105, 112
see also post-humanism
Husserl, Edmund 10, 11, 48, 49,
72, 84–5, 115
on God 46
Logical Investigations 33
The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology 12, 18
The Origin of Geometry 17
hydrogen technology 91, 92, 93
hyper-epochality 111, 130, 131
hypochondria 113
hypomnematon 2, 25, 60–1, 62,
66, 86, 92
fiduciary 65
hypomnesis
and anamnesis 2, 16, 18–19,
49, 115, 124
Platonic 66
writing as 2, 25, 49, 124
id 64
idealizations 17, 63
ideas, dominant 19, 78
identification 47, 63, 72
différantial 48
primary 88
identity struggles 31
illusions 13, 47, 95
image
Kantian 17, 18
object- 3, 17–18, 23
imagination 65
artificial 16–17
Kant’s three syntheses 42
the desiring projection of
22–3
pharmacology of the 15–17
transcendental 16–17, 19, 42
immanence 46
infinite 77–8
individuation 21, 30, 34, 39, 45,
86
creative and normative 41,
56
loss of 50, 120–1
psychic and collective 54, 64,
70, 81–4, 95, 96–7, 101–2,
105, 112
technical 105–6, 119
through the other 110
see also co-individuation;
transindividuation
Index
industrial democracies, social
development of 89–90
industrial model, change to 93–4,
98
industrial pharmacology 18–19,
31, 37, 49, 50–1, 55, 127–30
industrial technics 9–10, 14–16,
18–19
industrialization 60, 74, 87,
101–2
of the pharmakon 116–18,
118, 121
infantilization, perpetual 125
infidelity
of the milieu 27–36, 53, 65
systemic 63, 64–5, 76, 130,
131
infinite
displacement of the 45–8
economy of the 74–6
immanence 77–8
as object of desire 2–3, 78
as renewable 93
infinitization 63, 66, 67, 75,
77–8, 107, 113
power of 59–78, 76–7
infinity 40, 43, 45, 46, 69–70, 76
and existence 76–7
innovation
acceleration of 103
‘ascending’ 94, 95
‘descending’ 94–5
permanent 32, 50, 63, 64–5
socialization of 94–5
intellect, decline of 13–14
intelligible, the 78, 125
intentionality 48, 54
intergenerational relations 63,
88, 89–90, 124–5, 128–31
interiority, default of 20–2
interiorization, technological
126–30, 131, 132–3
159
internalization
of mediatized milieu 66–7
prosthetic 116–18
of relation of care 20–2, 130
selection criteria and the
process of 113–16,
117–18
technical 121, 127
Internet 37, 38, 93
intertextuality 48
intoxication, after 54–6
intuition 46–7, 49
investment 54–5
destruction of 22–3, 82
long-term 94
in the object 47, 90
politics of 83–4
return on 50–1, 129
see also reinvestment
irrationality 15
Jaurès, Jean 112, 113
Kant, Immanuel
‘On a Recently Prominent Tone
of Superiority in Philosophy’
115
a priori concept 17, 18
on suprasensible 93
transcendental imagination
16–17, 42, 46
kenosis 59–78,
industrial 74–6
Keynesianism 89
Klein, Melanie 34, 71
knowledge
as an after-effect of
pharmacological shock 34–6,
37
destruction of political 38
geometrical 17
of infinitizing 76–7
160
Index
knowledge (cont.)
loss of 19–20, 30–2, 74, 76,
93, 123–4, 128
maternal 2
new of questioning 115,
123–4
noetic 102
perfect 46
source in thinking for oneself
2, 18
technical 24
therapeutic 31, 36, 123–4
transgenerational circuits of
124–5, 128
universal/theoretical 31–2,
131
krisis 5, 126–7
Kristeva, Julia 48
labour
and capital 39, 50–1, 52–3
cybernetic division of 55
division of 74, 94, 127, 129
hard 113
Lacan, Jacques 24, 62, 101,
110
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
125
lack (Lacan) 24, 62, 64
languages, babelization and
idiomaticity of 109, 126
learning 18, 68, 130
how to live 41, 53
Leroi-Gourhan, André 112, 113,
115
L’Humanité 112
liberalism 64
libidinal ecology, of infinite
immanence 77–8
libidinal economy 24–5, 34, 43,
49, 53, 63, 71–2, 78, 82, 90,
116
dysfunction of 23, 93, 124
a new 96–8, 98, 120
libidinal energy 51, 63, 71, 90–1,
92–4, 98, 125
destruction of 81–4, 89, 91,
94
libido, pharmacology of the
24–5, 76, 92–4
life
grammatization of 60
the new critique of 127–30,
132–3
a new way of 40–2, 47, 96–8,
123
technical extension of 28–9
life worth living 1–5, 21, 33, 41,
56, 75, 76, 132–3
pharmacologically 40–2, 43,
68, 70
light-time 37, 38
‘liquid society’ (Bauman) 64
logos
and co-individuation 18
divine became secular ratio
61
pharmacological character of
16
long-term horizon 89–90
lovable, discernment of the 43–5
love 2, 76, 78
Luhmann, Niklas 31
Luther, Martin 61
Lyotard, Jean-François, The
Postmodern Condition 64,
83
machine-tools 19–20, 53, 70, 74,
87
madness 3–4
Madoff, Bernie 59
magic 73
making do (faire avec) 42, 45
Index
man
capable of variation 28–9
as Dasein 105, 107–9, 114
humanity of 104–6, 112–13,
122–3, 132–3
incapable of taking care of
himself or others 32
as a prosthetic god 14
mana 73
Manichaeism 77
Maoris 73
Marcuse, Herbert 22
marketing 10, 31, 32, 63, 82, 89
by age-grouping 129–30
socialization via 74, 84, 90,
94, 95, 103, 121
of transformational technology
127–30
Marx, Karl 39, 87
Marxism 39
mathesis 18, 19
matter 103, 117
maturity (majorité) 15, 42, 128
Mauss, Marcel 72
meaning
and emotion 67
production of 67–8, 85–6, 95
melancholy 3, 14–15, 25, 43,
113, 117
Melanesians 73
melete 34, 115
memory
anamnesic 2, 18
artificial (hypomnesic) 2, 18,
25
epigenetic 65
industrialization of psychic and
collective 83
phylogenetic 65
as secondary retention 85–6
technical 65
transcendental 18, 19
161
metadata 95, 96–7
metalanguage 96–7
metaphysics 50
Meyer, Leonard 85
milieu
associated 97–8, 119, 129,
130–1, 132–3
‘associated techno-geographic’
(Simondon) 95–6
audiovisual pharmacological
69, 72, 111
digital 75, 76
epiphylogenetic 65–6
hyper-mediatized and
hallucinatory 66–7
‘infidelity of the’ 27–36, 53,
65
‘preindividual’ (Simondon) 48
for relations of fidelity 62
transitional 78, 84, 114
military 37–9
minds, control of 15–16
miscreance (mécréance) 59, 95
misgrowth (mécroissance) 90, 95
monotheism 77
Monsanto 128, 131
moral consciousness 23
Moses 108–9
mother
bypassing the 127
care by the 1–4, 20–2
motives 23, 93–4
pure and infinite 34
motricity 66, 69
mystagogy 115
names 129–31
nanotechnology 104, 117
nationalism 30
needs, hierarchy of 13–14
negotium, and otium 13, 50, 53,
60–1
162
Index
networks 81–4
communication and
information 92–3
digital 37–9, 81–2, 95–6, 103
energy 93
‘neurocentrism’ 68
Nietzsche, Friedrich 61, 76–7,
78, 111, 133
The Gay Science 62
nihilism
and grammatization 59–62
as a historical process 77
Nietzsche on 61, 76–7
pharmacology of 57–78
noesis 65, 132–3
as a technesis 124, 126
noetic value 13–14, 19, 34, 41,
44, 52, 68, 102–3
non-existent objects,
pharmacology of 1–2, 32–4,
62, 66, 75–6
noopolitics 98
normativity 27–36, 39, 41, 54,
56, 65, 68, 123
Canguilhem on 28–9, 30, 67,
76, 118, 123
novelty, thinking a 127
nuclear criticism 38–9, 40–1,
42–3, 44
nuclear fire, pharmacology of
37–56
obesity 55
object-images 3, 17–18, 23
objects
consistences of 67–8, 69–70
of desire 62–3, 75–6, 92
invested with spirit 72–4
relating to 47–8
see also fetishized objects; nonexistent objects; Thing, the;
transitional object
obligation 72, 73–4
obsolescence 32, 63, 64–5, 76,
78
ontology 18, 33–4, 106
ontotheology 77–8
organology 22, 44–5, 72, 117
of the brain 69–70
‘general’ 82, 114
as a pharmacology 13
of spirit 12–14, 68–70
three levels 35, 52, 67–8, 119
transformation process 104
organs 13
cerebral relational 67–8
perfecting 14–15, 24, 25, 28,
44
system of artifical 14–15, 28–9,
104
original sin 9, 108–9
other(s) 3, 45, 76–7
otium 13, 49, 53, 60–1, 95, 115
Pascal, Blaise 52
pathogenesis 27–36
the sterilization of 30–2
pathos 23, 27–8, 35, 72, 120,
123
perception
grammatization of 50, 70
as production 124, 125
Perec, Georges 62
pessimism, global 9
pharmacological challenge
109–10, 114–16, 119,
126–7
pharmacological situation 3–4,
106–18, 120, 131
‘pharmacological turn’ 60,
104–6, 130–3
pharmacology 4
of adoption 25, 131
of capital 51, 78, 79–98, 103
Index
industrial 18–19, 31, 37, 49,
50–1, 127–30
new 103, 111, 119–33
of the question 4–5, 21–2,
99–133
‘Pharmacology of Capital and the
Economy of Contribution’
(Stiegler) 103
pharmakon
the ‘absolute’ 37, 39, 53
attentional effects 86–7
as automaton 37–9, 44
becoming-remedy of 26
as condition of care 5, 76, 77
as condition of its own critique
16–17
first, transitional object as 2–4,
20–2, 48, 68–70
hypomnesic 86
industrialization of the 116–18,
121, 127–30
and the pharmacology of the
scapegoat 19–20, 119–23
prosthetic 108–10
second, of the letter 48, 65
spatialized time of the 39–40
the step beyond 39–40
phenomenology, transitional
dimension of 46–8
philia 35, 65, 72, 76, 78, 81,
120, 123, 124
philosophy 52, 105
Kantian question 44
and new political question 16
Platonic question 44
and transcendental objects 33
planet, future of the 4–5, 81–2,
84–7
Plato 31, 78, 115, 123, 129
Gorgias 70, 86
Phaedo 26
Phaedrus 2, 25, 86
163
Protagoras 52
Symposium 23, 34, 123
on thought 10, 16, 18, 19
Platonism 34, 44
play 48, 51
of Eros and Thanatos 25
Playing and Reality (Winnicott) 4
Plutarch 122–3
political economy 97–8, 110–11
of the question 121
of the spirit 23
politics
of care 97–8
destruction of 38, 103
impossibility of making
decisions 52, 53
leadership in 97
local 96
new of adoption 130–1,
132–3
new industrial 87
technologies and the
transindividuation of disputes
94–6
positive sciences 11–12
post-humanism 104, 106–8,
112–13, 118
postmodernity 120
potential space 1, 21, 116
see also transitional space
Pour en finir avec la mécroissance
(Stiegler) 95
poverty, symbolic and economic
120
power
of the Church 50
the will to 133
praxis 52, 124
pregnancy, voluntary termination
129
printing press 60
pro nobis 61
164
Index
production 16, 22, 49, 51, 54,
90–1
and consumption 51–2, 90–1,
92–3, 94, 102, 127, 129,
131
grammatization of 74
mass 74
perception as 124, 125
sublimatory 63
threat of overproduction 88
programmatology 35, 119
progress 14, 32
infinite 40, 46
projection 3, 16, 23, 45, 47, 65,
69, 72, 94, 107–8
proletarianization 15–16, 70, 74,
93, 102, 116, 130
archi- 111
of art 49–50
critiques of 126–7
as the death of God 46
as disapprenticeship 30–2,
87
generalized 22–3, 27, 55, 76,
103, 131
hyper- 112, 130
industrial 127–8
of interiorization 126–31
a new
of procreation 127–8
of spirit 19–20, 115, 131
structural 38
of the theoretical 33, 123–4
total 37–56, 106
see also deproletarianization
prometheia 34, 45, 52
Prometheus, fire of 24
promises 132–3
proper, the 45, 54, 113–14
prostheticity 14, 25, 108–10,
113–18, 127, 127–8
protention 25, 62, 84, 85
psychic apparatus
destruction of 90
healthy 3, 51
and social apparatus 81–2
psychoanalysis 123
psychogenesis
infantile 20, 66
as sociogenesis 72
psychopathology 21
psychopower 27, 50, 51, 81–2,
84, 88, 98
psychotechnologies 81–4, 88
‘public relations’ 95
quasi-transcendental 43, 44, 70
question
of being 107–9, 115
calling into 110–11, 113,
116–18, 120–1, 125, 126–7,
131
impossibility of posing
106–8
pharmacology of the 4–5,
99–133
political economy of the 121
possibility of posing 102–7
of the question 105–8, 115
therapeutic 21, 48, 88–9, 111,
124
the time of the 101–18
ratio, as calculation 61, 75
rationality
new social 93–4
technological 16
rationalization 15, 16, 45–6, 50
nihilistic destiny of 65
power to dominate through 16,
22, 27
technoscientific 18, 74
reading, therapeutic of 60–1
reason 23, 40, 47
Index
redoubling
double epokhal 34–6, 44, 49,
65, 112–16, 126, 131
epokhal hyper- 111
first 35, 51
second 35, 49, 120
reflexivity 44–5
Reformation 50, 60, 61
regression
by the noetic soul 124
critical 16, 23, 31–2, 52
mass 14
reinvestment 89–90
relational technologies
(‘R technologies’) 95–6
relations
networks of 72, 95–8
other 3, 45
symbolic 72
transductive 69–70, 71
religion 50, 59, 61, 108–9
Renaissance 60
reproduction 127–30, 131
retentions
capacity to critique 102, 119,
129
play of 23, 54, 84–7, 92, 123
primary 85
secondary 85–6
see also tertiary retention
reticulation, age of 83–4, 95–6,
96
Rifkin, Jeremy 90–1, 92–3, 96,
98
The Age of Access 90
The European Dream 90
Ronell, Avital 132
rupture 87
Saussure, Ferdinand de 70
savoir-faire 20, 31, 32, 39, 53,
70, 87–8, 124, 131
165
savoir-vivre 31, 32, 53, 88, 124,
131
new 92–4, 129
scapegoat(s)
children as the new 119–23
pharmacology of the 19–20,
108–9
Schumpeter, Joseph, Theory of
Economic Evolution
63
science 11, 16
pharmakon constituted through
18–19
seed, sterile or Terminator,
transgenic 128
selection criteria 113–16,
117–18, 127–30
self 21, 55
beyond the 45
‘false’ 64–5, 68, 70–1
and pharmacology of the soul
70–2
techniques of the 76–7, 84, 95
transitional 70–1
‘true’ 33, 70–1
self-destruction 9, 14, 26, 40–1,
51, 110
Sen, Amartya 96
sensible 78, 125
genealogy of the 69, 72
service-based societies 88
short-termism 63, 82–4, 94,
103–4
signification, formation of 67
Simondon, Gilbert, 18–19, 30,
34, 48, 95–6
L’Individuation psychique et
collective 71
on psychic and collective
individuation 64, 81–2,
83–4, 97, 112
on the transindividual 119–20
166
Index
sin 9, 77, 108–9
singularity, infinite 43
skhole 95, 115
‘smart grids’ 93
Smith, Adam 50, 52
smoking 55
social apparatus, and psychic
apparatus 81–2
social networks 83–4, 92, 96–8
social relations
grammatization of 60, 95–6
pre-digital 96
socialization
of innovation 94–5
of libidinal energy 81–4
of transformational
technologies 127–8
via marketing 74, 84
society
defending against a process that
ruins time 89–90
evolution 74–5
sociogenesis, psychogenesis as
72
sociotechnologies 82–4
sociotherapy 45
Socrates 105, 124
and Asclepius 26
Sorge 25, 83
sorrow (peine) 113, 114, 115
soul
body and 49
the noetic 124–5
pharmacology of the 70–2
transformation of the 19–20,
71
Souvarine, Boris 52
spectrality 47–8
speculation 22, 51, 82–3, 94
speech 16, 49, 85–6, 125–6
speed 50–1, 102–3
and time 38, 40
Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics 23
spirit
of capitalism 51, 90
economy of 12–14
organology of 12–14, 68–70
pharmacology of 7–56, 60,
72–4
political economy of the 23
proletarianization of 19–20,
115, 131
technologies of 95–6, 98
two sides of good and evil
10–11
work of the 115
sterilization
of pathogenesis 30–2
social 39
stupidity
struggling against 132–3
systematic 22–3, 55, 127,
131
sublimation 3, 42, 49, 54, 63,
68, 73, 78, 90, 98, 110,
113
Freud on 24–5, 34, 71
subsistence 33, 35
energy of 92–4, 98
suicide 14, 26, 51
supplement, the 22, 45, 49, 69
suprasensible 61, 69, 78, 93
suspension, primary and
secondary 35, 44, 49–50,
51–2, 119–20, 123
sustainable development 90–1,
94
symbolization 64, 72, 129
synthesis speciosa (Kant) 17
systems
evolution of new 93, 95–6
hypomnesic 92
interactive 38, 95–6
of objects 62–3
Index
for producing metadata 95–6
of reference (Heidegger) 119
social, psychic and natural 29,
32, 103–4
stupidity of 22–3, 55, 127,
131
symbolic of sexual difference
129
technical 101–4, 114
therapeutic of care 87–8
see also infidelity, systemic
Taking Care of Youth and the
Generations (Stiegler)
118
taonga 73–4
Taylor, Mark 61
technicity 29, 113–14
technics 24, 104
constitutes the default 24–5,
105–6
interiorization of 126–7
pharmacological 14–16,
18–19
Technics and Time (Stiegler) 34,
48, 62, 65, 113
technogenesis 28, 72
technologies 82
collaborative 54–5, 84
reticular 96–8
see also cognitive technologies;
transformational
technologies
tekhne 124
teratology 16
terrorism 30
tertiarization 39
tertiary retention 17, 19–20, 23,
33, 52, 54, 86–7, 92, 105
and transindividuation 84–7,
115
Thanatos 25
167
theory
proletarianization of 52, 131
as a rational form of care
32–3, 53
therapeutic of pharmacology 23,
26, 34, 52, 60, 76–7, 87,
120, 123–4, 130
therapeutic question 21, 48,
88–9, 111
Thing, the 59–78, 120–1
see also Ding, das
things 3, 74–6
formation of 66
‘internet of’ 60, 75
the spirit of 72–4
thought 16, 114
autonomy of 2, 18–19, 106,
132–3
carelessness of infinitizing
75
as creativity 33
philosophical 21
proletarianization 52–3, 118,
124
time
abstraction of labour 39
deferred 124
the measurement of 39–40
of the question 101–18
‘real’ 37
spatialized 39–40, 115
and speed 38, 103
see also light-time
tools 19–20, 28
see also machine-tools
toxicity 3, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 32,
64, 69, 88, 90, 110, 113,
114, 115, 127, 130
trace 68, 70, 84, 87
transcendence 46, 77
transcendental imagination
16–17, 19, 42, 46
168
Index
transcendental objects, and
philosophy 33
transformational technologies
102–6, 116, 117, 126–7, 131
marketing of 127–30
transindividual (Simondon)
18–19, 119–20
transindividuation 21, 32, 33,
38, 44, 46, 51, 71, 75–6, 78,
114–16
as adoption 101–2, 105–6,
117–18, 120
and anamnesis 18–19, 31, 106
‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’
95
and the brain 68–70
circuits of desire 19, 72, 77,
125
as a critical process 126–7
of disputes, and political
technologies 94–6
the first object of 65–8
grammatization of 82–4, 97–8
intergenerational 129–31
new long circuits in 68, 71,
123–6, 128–30, 132–3
and tertiary retention 84–7
transitional object 1–4, 25, 33,
47, 72, 78, 121
milieu of 29, 62–3, 69,
129–30
pharmacology of the 20–2, 66,
77, 125
and systemic infidelity 64–5
Winnicott on 1–4, 43, 66, 68,
125
transitional space 1, 33–4, 44,
45, 48, 52, 54–6, 65, 69–70,
74
internalization of 20–2
Winnicott on 21, 25, 66, 71,
73, 116
trust 3, 59, 63, 64, 75, 76, 98
child’s 69
loss of 5, 53, 103, 131
primordial 68
systemic destruction of 64–5,
70
Uechi, Jenny, Abdusters 89
unconscious 24, 47, 48, 64, 75,
76, 77
pharmacological critique of the
22–3, 42, 48
understanding 42, 49
and intuition 46
that Dasein has of its being
109–10, 114, 119–20, 123
Unheimlichkeit (uncanny) 101,
106–8, 110–11
United States 61, 74, 81
consumerism 87–8, 91
Valéry, Paul 89
‘Freedom of the Mind’
12–14
La crise de l’esprit 9, 10–11,
41
values
conflict over 13–14
re-evaluation of 72, 75, 77
Vaucanson, Jacques de 37
Vernant, Jean-Pierre 24
Virilio, Paul, Speed and Politics
38
virtues 10–11, 26
war 10–11, 24, 32
disguised as peace 9
economic 9–10, 32, 89–90
intergenerational 125
we 46, 61, 104–6, 110
Weber, Max 15, 35, 46, 50, 59,
61, 90
Index
Weil, Simone, ‘Experience of
Factory Life’ 52–3
Winnicott, Donald 1–4, 48, 51,
110, 130
on creativity 21, 30, 39, 67,
76, 123
on the ‘false self’ 64, 70–1
Playing and Reality 4
on transitional object 1–4, 43,
68, 125
on transitional space 21, 25,
66, 71, 73, 116
169
world 3, 63
re-enchantment of the 76
world wars 10, 12–13
World Wide Web 38, 92
writing
as hypomnesis 2, 25, 49, 86,
124
Plato on 10, 124
psychic inscription 70
Wyatt, Robert 77
Zimmerman, Frederick J. 66